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  3. The economic controls implemented during the second world war make today’s restrictions on restaurants and football stadiums loo

The economic controls implemented during the second world war make today’s restrictions on restaurants and football stadiums loo

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问题         The economic controls implemented during the second world war make today’s restrictions on restaurants and football stadiums look lax. In America the government rationed everything from coffee to shoes and forbade the production of fridges and bicycles.
    【B1】____________________By 1950 carmakers were producing more than 8m vehicles a year.
    Governments today are slowly easing lockdowns, as vaccines reduce deaths from COVID-19. Attention is turning to the likely shape of the economic recovery. The big question is whether or not the rich world can repeat the post-war trick, with pent-up savings powering a rapid bounce-back.
    Households have certainly accumulated lots of cash. The data on personal saving has been gathered—the difference between post-tax income and consumer spending—for 21 rich countries. 【B2】____________________In fact they saved $6trn. That implies "excess saving" of about $3trn—a tenth of annual consumer spending in those countries. Households in some places have built up bigger cash piles than those in others. In America excess savings may soon exceed 10% of GDP, in part because of President Joe Biden’s $1.9trn stimulus plan.
    Households do not usually save on such a scale during recessions. For one thing, their incomes usually fall, as their pay is cut or they lose their jobs. But governments in the rich world have spent 5% of their combined GDP on furlough schemes, unemployment benefits and stimulus cheques during the pandemic. As a result, household incomes have actually risen in the past year. At the same time, lockdowns have reduced opportunities to spend.
    What will consumers do with the cash? If they were to spend it all in one go, rich world GDP growth would probably exceed 10% in 2021, a figure so heady it would put the postwar recovery to shame. At the other extreme, households could spend none of their savings, perhaps if they anticipated that their tax payments would eventually have to rise in order to pay for the enormous stimulus packages.
    Research by JPMorgan Chase, a bank, suggests that in many rich countries consumption will soon rebound to near its pre-pandemic level, powering a strong global recovery.
    【B3】____________________These evidences point to a fairly rapid recovery in both output  and employment.
    Such calculations are highly uncertain, however, and not only because there are few precedents apart from the second world war. 【B4】____________________
    Take distribution first. There seems little doubt that in all rich countries wealthier people have accumulated most of the excess savings. They have been the least likely to lose work. A big share of their spending is discretionary, say on holidays or meals out; and it is many of these services that have been shut down during the pandemic.
    America’s fiscal stimulus has been unusually generous. A third round of cheques, for $1,400, will soon be sent to most adults. Top-ups to unemployment benefits have ensured that many people who lost work have earned more from the state than they did in their jobs. 【B5】____________________A new study by the JPMorgan Chase Institute found that in late December the poorest Americans’ bank balances were some 40% higher than the year before, compared with about 25% higher for the richest. The poorest half have seen their liquid assets rise in value by 11% in the past year, nearly twice the increase for the rich 1%.
    [A] Goldman Sachs, another bank, reckons that in America the spending of excess savings will add two percentage points to GDP growth in the year after full reopening.
    [B] Had the pandemic not happened, households would probably have accumulated $3trn in the first nine months of 2020.
    [C] And that points to a striking contrast with the postwar boom. America’s recovery was impressive enough, but Europe’s was even more so, with GDP growth running 50% faster throughout the 1950s.
    [D] Two factors matter: how the accumulated pots of cash are distributed across households;  and whether people treat those pots as income or as wealth.
    [E] The result is that low-income Americans may have saved even more than the rich, relative to their incomes.
    [F] In 1943 its entire auto-mobile industry sold only 139 cars. Two years later the war ended, and a consumer led boom ensued. Americans put to use the personal savings they had accumulated in wartime.
    [G] In America and Japan, by contrast, excess savings are a result of higher income because of stimulus payouts, not spending cutbacks.
【B2】
选项
答案 B
解析 本题空格之前讲的是大量的家庭积累了很多现金在手中，并提到了21个富裕国家的个人储蓄数据。空格之后以In fact开头：“实际上，他们已存储了6万亿美元。”可见，空格处也是讲家庭储蓄，并且储蓄值与6万亿有差距。选项中讲到储蓄的有选项[B]、[E]、[G]，选项[E]讲低收入的美国人储蓄比例比富人高，本题空格前后没有提及美国的贫富两个群体的储蓄，只是在总体论述，故排除选项[E]。选项[G]讲到美日两国，过剩储蓄是由于刺激性的大额消费带来的更多的收入，选项中的by contrast．说明空格前应有与之构成对比的内容，然而空格前只是概述大量的家庭积累了很多现金，故排除选项[G]。选项[B]讲到，如果新冠疫情没有发生，到2020年的前9个月，家庭总共可能会存储3万亿美元。这个句子是一个虚拟语气，是一种假设的情况，和后面In fact构成了逻辑上的衔接，$3trn和$6trn也形成了对比，即家庭本来可能储存3万亿美元，而事实上他们存了6万亿，故为答案。
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