控股权 Controlling interest.doc

Controlling interest Before the financial crisis life was simple for central bankers. They had a clear mission: temper booms and busts to maintain low and stable inflation. And they had a seemingly effective means to achieve that: nudge a key short-term interest rate up to discourage borrowing (and thus check inflation), or down to foster looser credit (and thus spur growth and employment). Deft use of this technique had kept the world humming along so smoothly in the decades before the crash that economists had declared a “Great Moderation” in the economic cycle. As it turned out, however, the moderation was transitory - and the crash that ended it undermined not only the central bankers’ record but also the method they relied on to prop up growth. Monetary policy has been in a state of upheaval ever since. The recession that accompanied the credit crunch in the autumn of 2008 delivered a massive blow to demand. In response central banks in the rich world slashed their benchmark interest rates. By early 2009 many were close to zero, approaching what economists call the “zero lower bound”. Even so, growth remained elusive. Pushing rates below zero, though technically possible, would not have helped. Negative rates would merely have encouraged depositors to withdraw their money from banks and hold it as cash, on which the rate of return, at zero, would have been higher. Central banks in the developed economies faced a frightening collapse in output and soaring unemployment without recourse to the tool that had been the mainstay of monetary policymaking for a generation. Central banks were not entirely unprepared for this challenge. In the 1990s the Japanese economy had slumped following an asset-price crash. Facing weak growth and deflation the Bank of Japan had slashed rates to near-zero before embarking on a series of experiments with unconventional monetary tools. Although the Bank of Japan’s performance was widely considered disappointing, if not an outright fail