简介Introduction

美国很可能会勉强度过这场危机，但是经过这场危机洗礼之后的美国将会是一个不同的国度，在世界上的地位也将改变。这或许是美利坚帝国终结的开始。The United States of America will likely muddle through this crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world.This might be the beginning of the end of the American Empire.

2006年9月7日，纽约大学的经济学教授鲁里埃尔•洛比尼（Nouriel Roubini）在国际货币基金组织（IMF）发表演讲，他向台下的经济学家们宣称，一场危机正在酝酿之中。他警告说，在未来的几个月和几年里，美国很可能会遭遇一场前所未有的房市崩溃、石油市场将会受到冲击、消费者信心将急剧下跌，美国将最终陷入一场严重的危机之中。他列举出一连串悲惨的事件：房产拥有者不能偿还到期的抵押贷款、数以万亿计的抵押担保证券将会在全球范围内显露出来、受到猛烈震荡的世界金融体系将会中止运行。他说，这些事态可能会使对冲基金，投资银行以及类似房利美（FannieMae）与房地美（FreddieMac）这样的大型金融机构陷入瘫痪，甚至有可能遭受灭顶之灾。On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

他的听众似乎对此表示怀疑，甚至不屑一顾。正当洛比尼演讲完毕，准备走下讲坛的时候，会议主持人抛出一句俏皮话：“听完之后，我想大家或许需要喝一杯烈酒。”听众中笑声一片——这倒难怪他们。在那时，失业率与通胀率并不高。虽然油价不断上升，房市正逐步走软，但是虚弱的经济依旧在增长。而且洛比尼自身就是一位末日论的鼓吹者，人们都知道他是一位永恒的悲观主义者，他是那种被经济学家称为“永恒的熊市主义者（permabear）”的典范。当经济学家艾尼凡•巴纳吉(Anirvan Banerji)谈及他对洛比尼演讲的看法时，他说他注意到洛比尼在做预言时，并没有使用数学模型，他认为这只是一位老爱唱反调的人士基于自身直觉的想法而已。The audience seemed skeptical, even dismissive. As Roubini stepped down from the lectern after his talk, the moderator of the event quipped, “I think perhaps we will need a stiff drink after that.” People laughed — and not without reason. At the time, unemployment and inflation remained low, and the economy, while weak, was still growing, despite rising oil prices and a softening housing market. And then there was the espouser of doom himself: Roubini was known to be a perpetual pessimist, what economists call a “permabear.” When the economist Anirvan Banerji delivered his response to Roubini’s talk, he noted that Roubini’s predictions did not make use of mathematical models and dismissed his hunches as those of a career naysayer.
但是不久之后，洛比尼的种种预言就得以证实。在随后的一年中，次级信用借款人不断倒闭，对冲基金的破产浪潮也已开始，股市下跌势头迅猛。就业率不断下跌，美元状况恶化，一场巨大的房市崩溃即将到来的征兆日益显露。随着信贷危机的恶化，不断增加的恐慌情绪在金融市场四处蔓延。到了夏末，美联储开始匆忙地实施拯救行动，拉开了违背传统干预经济的序幕。美联储采取的措施包括：削减50个基准点的贷款利率，尽全力买进数以百亿计的抵押担保证券。洛比尼去年9月回到IMF，发表他的第二次演讲。他预测，不断滋长的偿付危机将影响金融体系的每一个部门。这一次，没有人笑。两次邀请洛比尼来IMF演讲的经济学家普拉卡什•朗格尼（Prakash Loungani）回忆说：“在2006年，他听起来就像是个疯子，而在2007年，他被人们奉为预言家。” But Roubini was soon vindicated. In the year that followed, subprime lenders began entering bankruptcy, hedge funds began going under and the stock market plunged. There was declining employment, a deteriorating dollar, ever-increasing evidence of a huge housing bust and a growing air of panic in financial markets as the credit crisis deepened. By late summer, the Federal Reserve was rushing to the rescue, making the first of many unorthodox interventions in the economy, including cutting the lending rate by 50 basis points and buying up tens of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities. When Roubini returned to the I.M.F. last September, he delivered a second talk, predicting a growing crisis of solvency that would infect every sector of the financial system. This time, no one laughed. “He sounded like a madman in 2006,” recalls the I.M.F. economist Prakash Loungani, who invited Roubini on both occasions. “He was a prophet when he returned in 2007.”

在过去一年中，每当乐观主义者宣称我们已经度过经济危机最严重的时期时，洛比尼总是以坚定的悲观主义言辞予以反驳。在2月份，传统观点认为华尔街那些备受尊崇的投资机构将安然度过这场危机，而洛比尼则警告说，它们中的一家抑或更多即将关门大吉——6个星期之后，贝尔斯登公司（Bear Stearns）应声倒下。今年春天，当美联储进一步采取一系列非同寻常的举措之后——其中包括为一些挑选的投资银行和证券经纪商提供授信额度支持——许多经济学家宣称经济即将复苏，信贷危机已经结束，一场衰退得以避免。洛比尼认为经济复苏前景不过是“一伙自私自利巧舌如簧的人士”助长的一种“自满的假象”而已。他依然坚持自己编撰的“噩梦”剧本：公司倒闭浪潮即将汹涌而至、诸如商业性房地产与市政债券这些市场即将垮台。最令人震惊的是，他预测说，大型的地区性或全国性银行有可能会倒闭，这将引发储户的恐慌情绪。这些事件并非都已发生（或许永远不会发生），但是上个月加州银行因迪美（IndyMac）的倒闭（这是美国历史上最大的破产案例之一）让人们对这位似乎总是未卜先知的洛比尼更加注意。Over the past year, whenever optimists have declared the worst of the economic crisis behind us, Roubini has countered with steadfast pessimism. In February, when the conventional wisdom held that the venerable investment firms of Wall Street would weather the crisis, Roubini warned that one or more of them would go “belly up” — and six weeks later, Bear Stearns collapsed. Following the Fed’s further extraordinary actions in the spring — including making lines of credit available to selected investment banks and brokerage houses — many economists made note of the ensuing economic rally and proclaimed the credit crisis over and a recession averted. Roubini, who dismissed the rally as nothing more than a “delusional complacency” encouraged by a “bunch of self-serving spinmasters,” stuck to his script of “nightmare” events: waves of corporate bankrupticies, collapses in markets like commercial real estate and municipal bonds and, most alarming, the possible bankruptcy of a large regional or national bank that would trigger a panic by depositors. Not all of these developments have come to pass (and perhaps never will), but the demise last month of the California bank IndyMac — one of the largest such failures in U.S. history — drew only more attention to Roubini’s seeming prescience.

结果，洛比尼，这位受人尊敬但以前总是默默无闻的学者已成为一位讨论经济事务时不可或缺的人物：一位能洞悉经济脉搏的预言家。他经常被邀请至国会、外交事务委员会以及达沃斯的世界经济论坛上发表演讲。如今的他已是一位备受欢迎的经济顾问。他经常穿梭在欧洲和亚洲，与各国的中央银行行长和财政部长一同出席各种会议。虽然他依然时不时地做出一些绝对是非主流的，色彩斑斓的世界末日预言——在他很受欢迎而且经常会引起论战的博客上，他为人们描绘出类似“股市大屠杀”以及“美国金融体系即将出现系统性坍塌”这些令人毛骨悚然的场景——但是主流经济学界似乎逐渐靠近（虽然是间歇性的）他观察事物的方式。今年早些时候，前任财政部长劳伦斯•萨默斯(Lawrence Summers)告诉我：“在过去的几个月里，与学界达成的共识相比，我变得更加悲观了。这种变化当然与洛比尼的文章有关。”As a result, Roubini, a respected but formerly obscure academic, has become a major figure in the public debate about the economy: the seer who saw it coming. He has been summoned to speak before Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum at Davos. He is now a sought-after adviser, spending much of his time shuttling between meetings with central bank governors and finance ministers in Europe and Asia. Though he continues to issue colorful doomsday prophecies of a decidedly nonmainstream sort — especially on his popular and polemical blog, where he offers visions of “equity market slaughter” and the “Coming Systemic Bust of the U.S. Banking System” — the mainstream economic establishment appears to be moving closer, however fitfully, to his way of seeing things. “I have in the last few months become more pessimistic than the consensus,” the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers told me earlier this year. “Certainly, Nouriel’s writings have been a contributor to that.”

去年冬天的一天，天气寒冷阴沉，我和洛比尼在纽约市的翠贝卡共进午餐。他坚称：“我并不是一位天生的悲观主义者，我不是那种总是以惨淡的视角观察事物的人。”我看了看他，发现这番言论难以令人信服。洛比尼脸色阴沉，显得非常忧郁，这让人觉得他非常痛苦，好像他所了解的事实压得他喘不过气似的。他不苟言笑，而当他发笑时，在一头蓬乱的棕色头发的映衬下，更像是在做鬼脸。On a cold and dreary day last winter, I met Roubini over lunch in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York City. “I’m not a pessimist by nature,” he insisted. “I’m not someone who sees things in a bleak way.” Just looking at him, I found the assertion hard to credit. With a dour manner and an aura of gloom about him, Roubini gives the impression of being permanently pained, as if the burden of what he knows is almost too much for him to bear. He rarely smiles, and when he does, his face, topped by an unruly mop of brown hair, contorts into something more closely resembling a grimace.

当我让他进一步阐述他不是一位悲观主义者的言论时，他停顿了片刻，言语变得稍显温和。 “与大多数人相比，我更加关切潜在的风险和弱点，”他轻描淡写地如许说道。他声称，这些关切与其说让他成为一位悲观主义者，倒不如说使他变成一位现实主义者，一位破除自满，戳穿虔诚，眼光犀利的局外人。When I pressed him on his claim that he wasn’t pessimistic, he paused for a moment and then relented a little. “I have more concerns about potential risks and vulnerabilities than most people,” he said, with glum understatement. But these concerns, he argued, make him more of a realist than a pessimist and put him in the role of the cleareyed outsider — unsettling complacency and puncturing pieties.

现年50岁的洛比尼一生中一直充当局外人的角色。他出生在伊斯坦布尔，父母是伊朗的犹太人。两岁时，他一家人搬到德黑兰，随后又去了特拉维夫，最终来到意大利，在那里他长大成人并且完成大学学业。他后来前往美国攻读哈佛大学国际经济学的博士学位。这些经历使他的波斯语、希伯来语、意大利语与英语都非常流利。他咆哮般的口音是通晓多种语言的人独有的特点，散发着一种被他称为“全球流浪者”所独具的疲惫感。Roubini, who is 50, has been an outsider his entire life. He was born in Istanbul, the child of Iranian Jews, and his family moved to Tehran when he was 2, then to Tel Aviv and finally to Italy, where he grew up and attended college. He moved to the United States to pursue his doctorate in international economics at Harvard. Along the way he became fluent in Farsi, Hebrew, Italian and English. His accent, an inimitable polyglot growl, radiates a weariness that comes with being what he calls a “global nomad.”

他的导师，现在就职于哥伦比亚大学的经济学家杰弗里•萨克斯（Jeffrey Sachs）说，洛比尼在哈佛大学上学时，就展露出异乎寻常的才华。不管他研究的是神秘莫测的数学模型，还是政治与经济制度，他都显得相当自如。“很难见到一个人会同时具备这些才能，”萨克斯这样对我说。在1988年取得博士学位之后，洛比尼加入了耶鲁大学的经济学系，在那里他第一次遇见经济学家罗伯特•希勒(Robert Shiller)，并开始和他交流各种观点。如今的罗伯特•希勒由于成功预测到上世纪90年代的科技泡沫而声名远播。As a graduate student at Harvard, Roubini was an unusual talent, according to his adviser, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs. He was as comfortable in the world of arcane mathematics as he was studying political and economic institutions. “It’s a mix of skills that rarely comes packaged in one person,” Sachs told me. After completing his Ph.D. in 1988, Roubini joined the economics department at Yale, where he first met and began sharing ideas with Robert Shiller, the economist now known for his prescient warnings about the 1990s tech bubble.

对于像洛比尼这样致力于国际经济学研究的学者来说，上世纪90年代可谓多事之秋。在这10年间，自1994年的墨西哥开始，一个接一个的新兴经济体遭到经济危机的袭击。恐慌情绪席卷亚洲（包括1997年的印度尼西亚与1998年的韩国）。巴西与俄罗斯的经济在1998年宣告破裂。在2000年阿根廷的经济也遭受灭顶之灾。洛比尼开始研究这些国家，不久就发现它们共有的弱点。他注意到，在危机降临前夕，大多数国家的经常账户都呈现巨额赤字（这意味着这些国家所花费的要远大于其所生产的）,而且它们往往是通过向国外举债的方式为这些赤字融资，这就使得它们面临类似全国性银行挤兑的风险。在大多数国家中，监管不力的金融体系深受过度借款，轻率贷款的困扰。公司治理乏善可陈，裙带主义泛滥成灾。The ’90s were an eventful time for an international economist like Roubini. Throughout the decade, one emerging economy after another was beset by crisis, beginning with Mexico’s in 1994. Panics swept Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia and Korea, in 1997 and 1998. The economies of Brazil and Russia imploded in 1998. Argentina’s followed in 2000. Roubini began studying these countries and soon identified what he saw as their common weaknesses. On the eve of the crises that befell them, he noticed, most had huge current-account deficits (meaning, basically, that they spent far more than they made), and they typically financed these deficits by borrowing from abroad in ways that exposed them to the national equivalent of bank runs. Most of these countries also had poorly regulated banking systems plagued by excessive borrowing and reckless lending. Corporate governance was often weak, with cronyism in abundance.

洛比尼的独到之处不仅在于他所得出的结论，他的研究方法也与众不同。他广泛应用跨国比较，并且使用历史数据进行类比，他采用的是一种主观性，非技术性的研究构架。这种方式深受《纽约时报》专栏作家保罗-克鲁格曼(Paul Krugman)和约瑟夫•斯蒂格利茨(Joseph Stiglitz)的赞赏，这是为了让那些不懂经济学术语的受众也能够理解。洛比尼不遗余力地表示说，他依旧是一位严谨的学院派经济学家。他对我说：“当我权衡证据时，我所依凭的正是我20年来积累的使用数理模型的经验”。然而他的方法并不是当代学术的典范。主流经济学家为了约束其主观印象，往往会建立一个模型，并严谨地使用一套不相关联的数据。正如希勒告诉我的那样，“洛比尼观察事物的方式与大多数的经济学家都不一样：他深入研究每件事情。”Roubini’s work was distinguished not only by his conclusions but also by his approach. By making extensive use of transnational comparisons and historical analogies, he was employing a subjective, nontechnical framework, the sort embraced by popular economists like the Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz in order to reach a nonacademic audience. Roubini takes pains to note that he remains a rigorous scholarly economist — “When I weigh evidence,” he told me, “I’m drawing on 20 years of accumulated experience using models” — but his approach is not the contemporary scholarly ideal in which an economist builds a model in order to constrain his subjective impressions and abide by a discrete set of data. As Shiller told me, “Nouriel has a different way of seeing things than most economists: he gets into everything.”

洛比尼将他的风格与美联储前主席艾伦•格林斯潘（Alan Greenspan）的风格相比较。据说格林斯潘（或许不足凭信）经常躺在浴盆中钻研大量技术性的经济数据，他用这种方式探寻经济发展趋势。洛比尼还谈到著名经济学家约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯（John Maynard Keynes）包罗万象，胸怀世界的研究方法，这也是其喜欢研究意识形态的一个例证。他略显夸张地将凯恩斯称为：“一位从来不写方程式，绝顶聪明的经济学家。” 洛比尼最终与经济学家布拉德•塞泽尔（Brad Setser）合作完成了一部研究新兴市场危机的著作《紧急救援抑或反之？》（Bailouts or Bail-Ins?），在这本400多页的书中，一个方程式也没有使用。Roubini likens his style to that of a policy maker like Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman who was said (perhaps apocryphally) to pore over vast quantities of technical economic data while sitting in the bathtub, looking to sniff out where the economy was headed. Roubini also cites, as a more ideologically congenial example, the sweeping, cosmopolitan approach of the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes, whom Roubini, with only slight exaggeration, calls “the most brilliant economist who never wrote down an equation.” The book that Roubini ultimately wrote (with the economist Brad Setser) on the emerging market crises, “Bailouts or Bail-Ins?” contains not a single equation in its 400-plus pages.

在分析了上世纪90年代倒塌的市场之后，洛比尼着手研究接下来哪一个国家会屈服于同样的压力。他的结论令人惊讶：这个国家就是美国。洛比尼当时认为：“美国看起来就像是一个最大的新兴经济体。”当然，美国不是新兴经济体。它过去是，并且现在依旧是世界上最庞大的经济体。但是美国经济，特别是它在2004年高达6千亿美元的经常账户赤字，让他倍感震惊。他开始撰写各种文章，阐述这一赤字所带来的危险。随后，他扩大了范围，着力研究信贷扩张（包括美国有史以来最大的房产泡沫）带来的各种效应。美联储在2003年将利率削减至几乎为零的水平，信贷扩张由此开始。房产泡沫即将破裂，洛比尼对此深信不疑。After analyzing the markets that collapsed in the ’90s, Roubini set out to determine which country’s economy would be the next to succumb to the same pressures. His surprising answer: the United States’. “The United States,” Roubini remembers thinking, “looked like the biggest emerging market of all.” Of course, the United States wasn’t an emerging market; it was (and still is) the largest economy in the world. But Roubini was unnerved by what he saw in the U.S. economy, in particular its 2004 current-account deficit of $600 billion. He began writing extensively about the dangers of that deficit and then branched out, researching the various effects of the credit boom — including the biggest housing bubble in the nation’s history — that began after the Federal Reserve cut rates to close to zero in 2003. Roubini became convinced that the housing bubble was going to pop.

到了2004年晚些时候，他开始描绘“噩梦般的硬着陆即将降临美利坚”的场景。他预测，外国投资者不会再为财政与经常账户赤字融资，并且会抛售美元，美国经济将遭受致命打击。他说，这些被他称为“孪生金融火车残骸”的问题或许会在2005年，最晚也会在2006年显露出来。“你是在这里最先受到警告的，”他在博客上这样写道，让人顿生不祥之感。但是到了2006年末，“火车残骸”并没有出现。By late 2004 he had started to write about a “nightmare hard landing scenario for the United States.” He predicted that foreign investors would stop financing the fiscal and current-account deficit and abandon the dollar, wreaking havoc on the economy. He said that these problems, which he called the “twin financial train wrecks,” might manifest themselves in 2005 or, at the latest, 2006. “You have been warned here first,” he wrote ominously on his blog. But by the end of 2006, the train wrecks hadn’t occurred.

在任何一个现代经济体中，衰退都是非常显著的事件。然而引人注目的是，经济学者在预测衰退方面，表现得相当糟糕。最近的一项研究专门针对60个不同的国家，在上世纪90年代遭受衰退袭击之前经济学家们所做的 “共识预测”（ 即大批经济学家所作的预测）。研究表明，在97%的案例中，经济学家们没有事先预测出一年之后即将出现的经济萎缩。罕有的几次，经济学家做出了正确的预测，但是他们往往严重低估衰退的严重性。更糟的是，许多经济学家甚至没有预测出2个月后即将发生的经济衰退。Recessions are signal events in any modern economy. And yet remarkably, the profession of economics is quite bad at predicting them. A recent study looked at “consensus forecasts” (the predictions of large groups of economists) that were made in advance of 60 different national recessions that hit around the world in the ’90s: in 97 percent of the cases, the study found, the economists failed to predict the coming contraction a year in advance. On those rare occasions when economists did successfully predict recessions, they significantly underestimated the severity of the downturns. Worse, many of the economists failed to anticipate recessions that occurred as soon as two months later.

这种沉闷的科学似乎是一种乐观的职业。包括洛比尼在内的许多经济学家都声称，乐观主义已经融入现代经济理论体系和数学之中。计量经济学模型一般都依赖这样的假设：不久的将来很可能类似最近的过去，因此这些模型很少能预测到经济中出现的裂痕。如果这些模型不能预见类似衰退这种相对轻微的裂痕，那么在构建模型预测类似全面爆发的金融危机这种严重的破裂时，它们就更显得无能为力。从事金融恐慌研究的20世纪经济学家只是极少数。其中最有名的一位或许就是已故的经济学家海曼•明斯基（Hyman Minksy），洛比尼是他的热心读者之一。洛比尼对我说：“这些事情大多数经济学家几乎不理解，我们正处于标准经济理论不能给予帮助的未知领域。”The dismal science, it seems, is an optimistic profession. Many economists, Roubini among them, argue that some of the optimism is built into the very machinery, the mathematics, of modern economic theory. Econometric models typically rely on the assumption that the near future is likely to be similar to the recent past, and thus it is rare that the models anticipate breaks in the economy. And if the models can’t foresee a relatively minor break like a recession, they have even more trouble modeling and predicting a major rupture like a full-blown financial crisis. Only a handful of 20th-century economists have even bothered to study financial panics. (The most notable example is probably the late economist Hyman Minksy, of whom Roubini is an avid reader.) “These are things most economists barely understand,” Roubini told me. “We’re in uncharted territory where standard economic theory isn’t helpful.”

或许的确如此，但是洛比尼的批评者并不认为他的方法更加准确。艾尼凡•巴纳吉（就是那位对洛比尼在IMF的第一次演讲提出挑战的经济学家）指出，数年来，洛比尼一直在兜售悲观主义；巴纳吉声称，洛比尼貌似正确的先见之明不过是各种事件不幸的巧合而已。他对我说：“即使一个停顿的钟表一天也会对上两次，这些年来，他证实自己看跌预期的理由一直在演变之中。”巴纳吉列举出洛比尼为了证明他的衰退危机预言所使用的不同理由：不断增长的贸易赤字、激增的经常账户赤字、卡特丽娜飓风以及飞涨的油价。巴纳吉注意到，洛比尼的所有预测都是基于与过去经验的类比。他说：“使用类比的方法进行预测是一件很诱人的事情，但是你做的类比必须恰当。这种更加主观的方法的危险在于，你往往会选择那些能够证实你现有观点的数据，而不是用客观数据决定你的观点。”True though this may be, Roubini’s critics do not agree that his approach is any more accurate. Anirvan Banerji, the economist who challenged Roubini’s first I.M.F. talk, points out that Roubini has been peddling pessimism for years; Banerji contends that Roubini’s apparent foresight is nothing more than an unhappy coincidence of events. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” he told me. “The justification for his bearish call has evolved over the years,” Banerji went on, ticking off the different reasons that Roubini has used to justify his predictions of recessions and crises: rising trade deficits, exploding current-account deficits, Hurricane Katrina, soaring oil prices. All of Roubini’s predictions, Banerji observed, have been based on analogies with past experience. “This forecasting by analogy is a tempting thing to do,” he said. “But you have to pick the right analogy. The danger of this more subjective approach is that instead of letting the objective facts shape your views, you will choose the facts that confirm your existing views.”

哈佛大学的经济学家肯尼思•罗格夫(Kenneth Rogoff) 与洛比尼已相识数十年。他告诉我，洛比尼的价值在于，他愿意考虑大多数经济学家共识之外可能出现的情况。他说：“如果你在欧洲中央银行询问哪一种最糟糕的事情可能发生，人们首先会说, 我们看一下洛比尼是怎么说的。”但是罗格夫警告说，不要把这种技能与预测划等号。换言之，当你想了解市政债券市场坍塌的可能性时，你可以向洛比尼咨询，他或许属于这种经济学家。然而，当你想了解全球的回形针需求时，他并不一定是做这种预测的恰当人选。Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard who has known Roubini for decades, told me that he sees great value in Roubini’s willingness to entertain possible situations that are far outside the consensus view of most economists. “If you’re sitting around at the European Central Bank,” he said, “and you’re asking what’s the worst thing that could happen, the first thing people will say is, ‘Let’s see what Nouriel says.’ ” But Rogoff cautioned against equating that skill with forecasting. Roubini, in other words, might be the kind of economist you want to consult about the possibility of the collapse of the municipal-bond market, but he is not necessarily the kind you ask to predict, say, the rise in global demand for paper clips.

他的支持者声称，洛比尼并不是那种过度悲观的人。他以前的导师杰弗里•萨克斯告诉我：“如果经济基本面的确令人乐观的话，洛比尼总是会相当乐观。”当然，洛比尼也能够乐观，至少他也会避免做出最糟糕的情况即将出现的预言。比如，他同意传统经济理论的判断：随着全球需求的减弱，在未来的几个月中，油价将会下跌至每桶100美元以下的水平。他告诉我：“我不会轻松自在地说，我们最终将陷于经济大萧条之中，我是一个讲道理的人。”His defenders contend that Roubini is not unduly pessimistic. Jeffrey Sachs, his former adviser, told me that “if the underlying conditions call for optimism, Nouriel would be optimistic.” And to be sure, Roubini is capable of being optimistic — or at least of steering clear of absolute worst-case prognostications. He agrees, for example, with the conventional economic wisdom that oil will drop below $100 a barrel in the coming months as global demand weakens. “I’m not comfortable saying that we’re going to end up in the Great Depression,” he told me. “I’m a reasonable person."

那么目前洛比尼观测到了那些经济发展趋势？他认为我们应该采取什么措施？在最近的一次谈话中，他告诉我，首先我们要承认问题的严重性。他说：“我们正处于一场衰退之中，拒绝承认这一点毫无意义。“当白宫的预算主任吉姆•尼塞尔(Jim Nussle)上个月宣布美国“已经避免了一场衰退”时，洛比尼对此表示怀疑。几个月来，他一直在预测，美国将遭受一场长达18个月的衰退，这场衰退最终将成为“自大萧条以来最严重的一次”。他确信经济将会在明年末出现技术性复苏，但是失业、公司倒闭以及其它制约增长的因素会在未来几年中继续对经济造成伤害。What economic developments does Roubini see on the horizon? And what does he think we should do about them? The first step, he told me in a recent conversation, is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. “We are in a recession, and denying it is nonsense,” he said. When Jim Nussle, the White House budget director, announced last month that the nation had “avoided a recession,” Roubini was incredulous. For months, he has been predicting that the United States will suffer through an 18-month recession that will eventually rank as the “worst since the Great Depression.” Though he is confident that the economy will enter a technical recovery toward the end of next year, he says that job losses, corporate bankruptcies and other drags on growth will continue to take a toll for years.

洛比尼忠告不同的政策制定者（其中包括美联储理事以及财政部高级官员）采取更积极的措施应对这场危机。美联储自去年夏天开始，将利率从5.25个百分点削减至2个百分点，他对此表示赞赏。他也支持美联储策划收购贝尔斯登公司的举动。洛比尼声称，美联储的行动避免了灾难的发生。但是他认为，未来的紧急救助措施应该针对抵押贷款拥有者，而不是投资者。因此他认为美国面临的抉择虽然严酷，但是很简单：要么政府为高达数万亿美元的高风险抵押贷款提供支持（这样做是为了让贷款人同意减少每月支付的抵押贷款数额），要么任由那些持有这些抵押贷款（或者由这些贷款衍生的复杂的证券）的银行和其它机构破产。他说：“要么将银行国有化，要么将抵押贷款国有化，否则，他们都会被烤焦。”Roubini has counseled various policy makers, including Federal Reserve governors and senior Treasury Department officials, to mount an aggressive response to the crisis. He applauded when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to 2 percent from 5.25 percent beginning last summer. He also supported the Fed’s willingness to engineer a takeover of Bear Stearns. Roubini argues that the Fed’s actions averted catastrophe, though he says he believes that future bailouts should focus on mortgage owners, not investors. Accordingly, he sees the choice facing the United States as stark but simple: either the government backs up a trillion-plus dollars’ worth of high-risk mortgages (in exchange for the lenders’ agreement to reduce monthly mortgage payments), or the banks and other institutions holding those mortgages — or the complex securities derived from them — go under. “You either nationalize the banks or you nationalize the mortgages,” he said. “Otherwise, they’re all toast.”

几个月来，洛比尼一直声称，住房危机的真正成本绝不止3000亿美元——这个数据是由众议员巴尼•弗兰克(Barney Frank)与参议员克里斯托弗•多德(Christopher Dodd)发起的住房议案大致估算的——而是居于1万亿与1.5万亿美元之间。但是洛比尼认为更重要的是，必须意识到问题远不止住房危机这么简单。他对我说：“有些鲁莽的人士自欺欺人，认为这只是一场次贷危机。但是，我们的其他债务也有问题：信用卡债务、学生贷款、汽车贷款、商业性房地产贷款、房屋净值贷款、公司债务以及融资收购债务。”他声称，林林总总的这些债务呈现出首先浮现在房产市场的某些或全部相似的特征：劣质承销、证券化、疏忽大意的信用评级机构以及松散的政府监管。他说：“我们的整个金融体系呈现出次贷危机的征兆，而不仅仅是抵押贷款市场。”For months Roubini has been arguing that the true cost of the housing crisis will not be a mere $300 billion — the amount allowed for by the housing legislation sponsored by Representative Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd — but something between a trillion and a trillion and a half dollars. But most important, in Roubini’s opinion, is to realize that the problem is deeper than the housing crisis. “Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis,” he told me. “But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts.” All of these forms of debt, he argues, suffer from some or all of the same traits that first surfaced in the housing market: shoddy underwriting, securitization, negligence on the part of the credit-rating agencies and lax government oversight. “We have a subprime financial system,” he said, “not a subprime mortgage market.”

洛比尼声称，呆账造成的大部分损失还没有注销，仅仅商业性房地产贷款一项造成的呆账损失就会将数百家地区性银行送入联邦存款保险公司的怀抱。他预计：“三分之一的地区性银行经受不住这次考验。”这些紧急援助行动又会使已经庞大无比的联邦债务再增加数百亿美元。这些债务以及消费者和公司累计的其他债务都必须由某个地方、某个人提供资金支持。洛比尼指出：“我们最大的融资人是中国、俄罗斯和海湾国家，这些都是我们的对手，而不是盟友。”Roubini argues that most of the losses from this bad debt have yet to be written off, and the toll from bad commercial real estate loans alone may help send hundreds of local banks into the arms of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “A good third of the regional banks won’t make it,” he predicted. In turn, these bailouts will add hundreds of billions of dollars to an already gargantuan federal debt, and someone, somewhere, is going to have to finance that debt, along with all the other debt accumulated by consumers and corporations. “Our biggest financiers are China, Russia and the gulf states,” Roubini noted. “These are rivals, not allies.”

洛比尼认为，美国很可能会勉强度过这场危机，但是经过这场危机洗礼之后的美国将会是一个不同的国度，在世界上的地位也将改变。“一旦你的经常帐户出现赤字，你需要依靠陌生人的怜悯度日，”他这样说道，然后停顿了一下，无奈地叹了一口气。“这或许是美利坚帝国终结的开始。” The United States, Roubini went on, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. “Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers,” he said, pausing to let out a resigned sigh. “This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.”