专访《灰犀牛》作者：各国政府应尽快减免债务，否则可能会有更多企业倒闭
对话《灰犀牛》作者米歇尔·渥克
文/李兆元
新冠疫情蔓延引发全球市场震荡，未来世界经济将如何发展？网易研究局专访了《灰犀牛》作者米歇尔·渥克。
以下为专访精编：
网易研究局·大师：如何看待当前疫情所处的阶段以及此次疫情对全球经济的影响？
米歇尔·渥克：我认为将这次经济震荡理解为大萧条是一个贴切的比喻。随着新冠病毒的爆发和蔓延，全球经济增长已经开始放缓。很多负面因素让经济变得十分脆弱，失业率急剧增加，但尽管如此，我认为我们仍然麻木，并且随之而来的是更多的痛苦。在我们研发出疫苗或是找到治疗COVID-19的方法之前，经济无法完全恢复生机。我们仍然不知道疫情会持续多久，持续的时间越长，对经济的多米诺骨牌效应就会越严重。
债务是一个很大的问题，国际货币基金组织（IMF）的分析师警告称，全球债务水平已经创下历史记录，经济极度容易陷入衰退。营收的下降意味着越来越多的公司将面临债务压力。在接下来的四年中，全球将有近11万亿美元的公司债务到期（每年约2万亿美元），在这种环境下很难再进行融资。我们可能会看到债务违约激增以及不良贷款上升。只要消费者的日子不好过，那么企业、房东和债权人也很难好过。因此，政府现在应该着手重组和减免部分债务，等待的时间越长，成本就会越高，并且随着越来越多的企业破产，银行倒闭，经济会变得更加混乱。
所有这些问题都造成了一个恶性循环：人们对经济的预期越糟糕，他们的消费或者投资就会越少。因此，政府应该果断采取政策来支持失业人员，重组债务，以及与私营企业合作来支持危机中正在出现的创新，这些措施将决定这种糟糕局面会持续多长时间。
网易研究局·大师：IMF公布了最新的世界经济预测，预计世界主要发达经济体的GDP增速今年会是-3%，这是否会加深市场的恐慌？世界各国应如何应对经济衰退？
米歇尔·渥克：IMF的预测可能是比较乐观的，因为这种预测基于一种假设——疫情影响将逐渐减弱，经济将在下半年恢复生机，但这种假设的不确定性很高。同样重要的是，这是一个平均值，是基于新兴市场国家比富裕国家将遭受更大损失的预测。但美国的实际失业率已经超过20％，远远超过官方的水平，这是自1934年以来的最高水平。
但事实是，我们无法对疫情进行准确的预测，因为我们不知道疫苗研发将花费多长时间，或者经济重新恢复正常需要多长时间。我们也不知道随着今年秋天，也就是下一个流感季节的来临，将会发生什么，因为许多人都认为可能会出现第二波感染。请记住，1918年的大流感持续了整整两年，我的曾祖父在1918年11月的第二波感染中去世。这在很大程度上取决于公民是否对戴口罩足够自律，包括经常洗手和避免聚集。在西方社会，大家都习惯于无视可能对他人造成的危险，这是一个重大问题。与几个月前相比，我们对药物测试和对病毒的了解有了一些进展，但是在能够完全控制病毒之前，我们还有很多要了解的事情。
疫情造成的结果取决于政策决策者的反应。政府会支持失业人群吗？是否会解决损害实体经济并助长投机的货币失衡问题？在美国，拥有信贷额度和其他资本来源的大公司花掉国会用于支持中小型企业的大量资金，民众存在着许多愤慨。令人们感到不安的是，那些使用大部分现金流回购股票的公司现在都在寻求政府的救助。
网易研究局·大师：您如何看待未来的油价趋势？减产协议是否意味着“原油价格战”已经结束？
米歇尔·渥克：在目前这种疯狂的情况下，我们不能认为一切都已经结束，但我认为负油价的冲击和石油供应的大规模减少将导致大量减产。现在有很多关于产量水平的争论，将再次伤害大型石油生产商。即使产量处于较为合理的水平，需求端也不足以支持几个月前的价格，许多较小的石油产出国将无法生存。无论是从温室气体排放量还是相关污染问题，研究都表明，人们更容易感染呼吸道病毒，转向清洁能源很可能是最后的结果。能源公司数十年来获得了巨额补贴，但是随着其他替代方案（其中许多创造了更多的就业机会）变得可行，政府不仅需要停止补贴非清洁燃料，而且还必须考虑其造成的健康和环境负面外部影响。
我希望看到的政策结果是低价征收碳税。消费者仍然会比之前付更少的钱，而且这部分财政收入将有助于减少迅速增长的财政赤字。减税这一措施将会发出一个信号，鼓励人们使用更清洁的交通方式，包括混合动力车，电动汽车，公共交通和自行车等等，并且可以重新定向对石油行业的工人提供新工作培训或过渡福利。
网易研究局·大师：全球疫情仍在蔓延，中国应该如何应对进出口的压力？对于外贸企业来说，全球订单萎缩，他们应该如何熬过这个寒冬？
米歇尔·渥克：对于制造业来说，情况已经很糟，服务业受到的打击更大。人们需要收入购买制造业产品，因此，我们需要一种从整体上拯救经济的办法。
可能对制造业有利的一件事是，疫情显示出了即时供应链管理的问题。企业需要重新考虑这一点，这可能会导致短期内更大的补货订单并有助于复苏。
我们将看到世界范围内的贸易格局发生巨大的变化。在政策问题上，我坚决反对民族主义封锁边境和限制贸易的倾向。我个人非常喜欢去到世界各地，并且从中收获了很多，这是全球化之前无法体验到的。
随着各国生产活动的恢复，许多产品的价格将在高薪地区上涨，因为它们的生产成本更高。各国将必须制定政策框架，以确保更多的公民能够负担得起更高的价格。这意味着要解决疫情暴露的经济不平等现象，并使之更加难以忽视。
中国面临的一线希望可能是，这是应对长期挑战的机会：使投资与消费实现更好的平衡。中国的政策应着眼于国内消费，促进中低收入人群就业和提高该群体的收入。
网易研究局·大师：疫情是否会加剧逆全球化趋势？如何看待近日一些国家禁止粮食出口？
米歇尔·渥克：很不幸，疫情的确加剧了逆全球化，可能会出现食物短缺的情况。听说有些国家禁止大米出口后，上周末我去了巴基斯坦人经营的当地超市，在那里我买了印度香米，他们说交货时间将会短暂延迟，但到目前为止还不错。不过，我并没有指望这种情况将会持续。
迄今为止，对食品供应链最大的破坏是由于工人患病而导致播种，收获和加工的中断。在美国，由于许多工人患病，屠宰场一直在关闭或削减肉类加工业务。疫情还损害了分销网络。我的家人来自中西部的威斯康星州，因其奶牛场和奶酪生产而被昵称为“美国的奶牛场”。我看到农民把牛奶倒在地上的视频，令人伤心，因为他们没有办法将牛奶卖给消费者，而且奶牛需要挤奶。尤其令人难过的是，在食物短缺，饥饿加剧的同时，还有着巨大的浪费。我看到了另一个有关养蛋农场主的故事，该农场主向慈善机构捐赠了2500个多余的鸡蛋，这些鸡蛋在几分钟内就全部消失了。
网易研究局·大师：美联储3月底实行无限量化宽松救市，从这几天的市场表现来看，是否已经对美股起到了支撑作用？美联储大规模量化宽松，是否是目前最佳的救市方案？
米歇尔·渥克：量化宽松的某些要素是必要的，但采取这种措施来应对意料之外的事件（比如市场泡沫）已经是很久之前的事情了。政府借款的大量增加意味着提高利率将迅速增加预算赤字。但是美联储的政策工具是有限的：内部人士所说的“传导机制”存在问题，如何将流动性注入实体经济而不仅仅是金融资产也是一个问题。政策的失败使经济陷入困境，也让我们的金融体系变得更加脆弱。国会需要采取一些应对措施来对冲政策带来的副作用：量化宽松对投机者的帮助超过了实体经济，工人和企业家。
荒谬的是，在这种经济现状下，美股仅比历史最高点低16%。市场逻辑是，美联储宣布将尽一切努力来挽救市场。这完全摧毁了传统的认知，并非明智的决定。股市反映了对未来经济增长的期望，这些期望将通过分红回报给股东。然而事实恰恰相反：在相当长的一段时间里，市场仅仅反映了投机者对进一步宽松货币政策的预期。经济预期越差，印的钱越多，投机的钱就越多。不幸的是，这些钱大部分都没有进入实体经济，这意味着最终这套纸牌屋极其不稳定。
美国的税收政策使这种动态情况变得更糟，因为它通过降低股票市场投资的税率和对风险保证金投资的税收减免来补贴市场投机活动。2017年美国将公司税率下调至21％，公司缴纳的税款仍然高于投资股票市场的人。对于持有超过一年的股票来说，即使是最高的“长期”资本利得税率，对于大多数高收入者来说也仅有20%。曾有人呼吁提高资本所得税税率，每一次市场大幅下跌，美联储都会降低利率，这是一种很疯狂的操作。但是当股市“熔断”时，他们不会紧急加息。这是一个错误：中央银行需要关注资产通胀以及其他经济体的物价水平。
作者简介：
米歇尔·渥克(Michele Wucker)，财经畅销书《灰犀牛：如何应对大概率危机》作者。2007年古根海姆学者奖获得者，2009年世界经济论坛“青年领袖”，她身兼数职，担任纽约国际政策研究所所长、芝加哥议会全球事务研究中心副主任、《国际金融评论》拉美办公室主任。
附英文实录：
NERB: Some people holds the view that weare now suffering a new round of Great Depression, which will be even worse than 1930s’. Do you agree with this comment? How do you evaluate the influence of coronavirus on world economy?
Michele Wucker: The Great Depression is an appropriate analogy, I am sad to say. The global economic outlook already was slowing, as a long expansion matured, before the coronavirus hit. So we already were hitting headwinds, which made us that much more vulnerable to the economic slowdown caused by the pandemic. Unemployment has already risen dramatically, but despite that I think we are still numb and that there is much, much more pain to come. Until we have a vaccine and better understanding of how to treat COVID-19, the economy will not be able to fully spring back to life. We still don't know how long that will be -and the longer it takes, the more economic dominoes will fall.
Debt is a big, big one. The International Monetary Fund and smart analysts whose views I respect have already been warning that record global debt levels have left the world extremely vulnerable to a recession. Falling revenues mean that more and more companies will have a hard time keeping up with their debt obligations. Nearly $11 trillion in corporate debt around the world matures over the next four years --roughly $2 trillion a year-- and will be much harder to refinance in this environment. We are likely to see a spike in corporate debt defaults as well as distressed consumer lending. As long as consumers are struggling, businesses, landlords, and creditors will too. So policy makers need to be working now to restructure and forgive some of that debt, because the longer they wait, the bigger the cost will be and the more chaotic things will be as businesses fail, taking banks down with them.
All of this creates a vicious downward circle: the worse people think it will be, the less they spend or invest. So decisive policy action to support the jobless, restructure debt, and --the one bright spot-- to partner with the private sector to support the innovation that is appearing amidst the crisis-- will play a big part in determining just how bad things will be and for how long.
NERB: The IMF forecasted that the global GDP growth rate will become -3% this year. How do you think about this forecast? Will this increase market panic? How should major economies respond to economic recession?
Michele Wucker: That forecast may turn out to be optimistic, as it assumes the pandemic will wind down and economies come back to life in the second half of the year and that's not 100% certain by any means. It's also important to remember that this is an average, based on projections that emerging market countries will suffer considerably more than wealthier countries. The United States already is at a real unemployment rate (which is much higher than the official level) of over 20% --the highest level since 1934.
But the truth is there's no way to forecast accurately, since we don't know how long it will take to create a vaccine or how long it will be until economies can fully re-open. We also do not know what will happen as the next flu season begins this fall, as many people expect another wave of infections. Remember that the 1918 flu pandemic lasted two full years. My great-grandfather died during the second wave, in November 1918. Much of this depends on how responsible citizens are in wearing masks, washing hands, and avoiding crowds. In the West, where there is a dangerous disregard for others in society, this is a major issue. There is some progress testing some drugs and more understanding of the virus than we had a few months ago, but we have much more to learn before we can safely control it.
The outcome depends on how policy makers react. Will they support people who have lost their jobs? Will they address the monetary imbalances that are hurting the real economy and helping speculators? In the United States, there has been a lot of justified outrage at how big companies with access to credit lines and other sources of capital took a lot of the money that Congress authorized to support small and medium sized businesses. People also have been upset that companies that used most of their free cash flow to buy back their shares now want government bailouts.
NERB: The oil price has been fluctuated during the past months and became negative this week, how do you think about the trend of oil price in the future? Does the reduction agreement mean that the "crude oil price war" has come to an end? How do you view the global demand for crude oil in the future?
Michele Wucker: We cannot assume that anything has come to an end in this crazy situation, but I suspect that the size of the negative price shock and oil supplies overwhelming storage capacity will cause a lot of production cutbacks. This is a terrible time to be having a spat about production levels and that will come back to bite big oil producers. Even if production is at more sensible levels, global demand will not support prices at levels where they were just a few months ago. Many smaller oil producers will not survive. Given the need to move to cleaner energy is not the worst possible outcome, both in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and related pollution issues which studies have shown make people more vulnerable to respiratory viruses. Energy companies have received huge subsidies for decades, but as other alternatives --many of which create more jobs-- have become feasible, governments not only need to stop subsidizing dirty fuels but also must factor in the health and environmental negative externalities they create.
The policy outcome I would like to see is taking advantage of low prices to institute a carbon tax. Consumers would still be paying less than before. The revenue would help put a dent (however small) in the rapidly growing fiscal deficits. The tax would send a message encouraging people to use cleaner transportation options, whether hybrids, electric cars, rideshares, public transport or bicycles. And it could be redirected toward new job training and/or transition benefits for oil industry employees.
NERB: Global manufacturing industries have been shrinking, how should we protect manufacturing companies in the world? For foreign trade companies, how should they survive in this disaster? How should China cope with the pressure on trade?
Michele Wucker: As bad as things have been for manufacturers, service industries have been hit even harder. And for people to buy manufactured goods, they need income. So we need a whole-of-economy approach.
One of the things that could be positive for manufacturing is that the pandemic has shown problems with the "just in time" supply chain management that had become so popular. Businesses will need to re-think that, which could lead to larger re-stocking orders in the short term and help with the recovery.
We will be seeing a dramatic re-shaping of trade patterns around the world On policy issues, I could not disagree more with the nationalist impulses to close borders and restrict foreign trade. And having traveled around the world, I personally love and benefit from being able to get things from far-away destinations that I would not have been able to get before globalization. But as someone who is profoundly concerned about climate change, I will be happy to see goods traveling shorter distances and think that is a positive trend. I would like to see labeling of goods to reflect their carbon footprint so consumers can make better prices.
As countries re-shore manufacturing, prices of many goods will rise in higher-wage destinations since they will be more expensive to manufacture. This will increase the use of automation and additive printing to bring costs down. Countries will have to put in place policy frameworks to ensure that more citizens can afford higher prices. This means addressing economic inequalities that the pandemic has brutally exposed and made harder to ignore.
The silver lining for China could be that this is an opportunity to address a long-term challenge: to bring into better balance investment and consumption. China's policy response should be a laser focus on domestic consumption. Measures to boost lower and middle class jobs and incomes will be a crucial part of this effort.
NERB: Will the epidemic enhance the anti-globalization trend? Some countries have banned rice exports, do you think we will fall into a food crisis?
Michele Wucker: Unfortunately, yes, the epidemic is already adding to anti-globalization. There will be food shortages. After I heard that some countries were halting rice exports, over the weekend I went to the local supermarket, run by Pakistani immigrants, where I get basmati rice. They said there had been a brief delay in deliveries, but so far so good. I'm not counting on that to last, however.
So far, the most dramatic disruption to food supplies has been in the interruption of planting, harvests, and processing because of worker illness. In the United States, slaughterhouses have been closing or cutting way back their meat processing operations because so many workers are getting sick.
The pandemic also has hurt distribution networks. My family is from Wisconsin in the Midwest, nicknamed "America's Dairyland" for its dairy farms and cheese production. There has been such sad video of farmers pouring milk onto the ground because they had no way to get it to customers, and the cows need to be milked. What's especially sad is that there will be tremendous waste alongside the shortages, at a time when hunger is increasing. I read another story of an egg farmer who donated 2,500 surplus eggs to a charity, and they were all gone in minutes.
NERB: The Federal Reserve is committed to use its full range of tools to support the U.S. economy and President Trump signed the bill of US $ 2 trillion economic stimulus plan. Do you think this will work? Do you think the infinite QE is the best rescue plan for the market?
Michele Wucker: Some elements of quantitative easing are necessary but it is long past time to put in counter-measures to deal with the unintended side effects, like market bubbles. The huge surge in government borrowing means that raising interest rates would quickly add even more to the budget deficit. But the Fed's tools are limited: there are problems with what insiders call the "transmission mechanism," or how to get liquidity into the real economy instead of just financial assets. That policy failing is part of what got us into this mess, making us that much more financially vulnerable to a pandemic. Congress needs to put in place counter measures against a major side effect: that QE is helping speculators more than the real economy, workers and business owners.
Right now the US stock market is only 16 percent off of its record high which is ridiculous given the economic realities. But market logic is that the Fed will do whatever it takes to support the markets. This completely destroys the conventional "wisdom" --which is not so wise-- that says the stock market reflects expectations for future economic growth that will be returned to shareholders through dividends. The reality is quite the opposite: for quite some time the markets have reflected only speculators' expectations of further loose monetary policy. And the worse economic expectations are, the more money will be printed, and the more money goes into speculation. Unfortunately, most of that money is not going into the real economy. And that means ultimately this house of cards is extremely unstable.
US tax policy makes this dynamic worse because it subsidizes market speculation, both through a lower rate for stock market investments and through a tax deduction for risky margin investing. The 2017 cut in corporate tax rates, to 21 percent, still left companies paying higher taxes than people who simply stick their money in the stock market. Even the highest "long term" capital gains tax rate --for stocks held more than a year, which is not very long term by most measures -- is 20 percent for high income earners. There have been some calls for increases in the capital gains tax rate, but there need to be more and much louder. It is crazy that it seems that every time the market drops sharply, the Fed lowers rates. But they don't do emergency rate hikes when markets "melt up." That is a mistake: central banks need to pay attention to asset inflation as well as price levels in the rest of the economy.
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