外报阅读(2012-6).docVIP

Passage 1 Monetary policy Threes company Jul 5th 2012, 15:57 by P.W. | LONDONTweet THE collective term for lions is a pride, for rooks a parliament—and central banks? Maybe the right word for them should be concert, for they often seem to move in concerted fashion together. Sometimes such actions are co-ordinated—as in the big rate reductions made by the world’s main central banks during the financial crisis in October 2008; or, more recently, the steps taken last November by the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB) and four others to ease dollar shortages in the euro area. Today’s decisions by three central banks in Asia and Europe were not a concerted effort, but they all eased monetary policy, albeit in different ways. In China, the central bank cut the benchmark lending rate from 6.31% to 6%. The European Central Bank (ECB) cut its main policy rate from 1% to 0.75%, a record low. In Britain, where the base rate has stood at an all-time low of 0.5% since March 2009, the chosen device was a third bout of quantitative easing (QE)—buying government bonds with freshly minted money. Over the next four months the Bank of England will purchase bonds worth an extra ￡50 billion ($78 billion), taking the total to ￡375 billion. The BofE previously had made purchases worth ￡325 billion in two separate phases, the last of which ended as recently as early May. These decisions to loosen monetary policy reflected growing apprehension about a global economic slowdown. A clutch of business surveys published earlier this week showed how manufacturing was experiencing a downturn in Asia, Europe and the Americas. In June, for the first time since November, Japan’s purchasing managers’ index (PMI) went below the level that separates expansion from contraction; Germany’s hit a three-year low; Brazil’s recorded contraction for the third successive month; and in the United States, the manufacturing index went below 50 for the first time since July 2009, when America was em