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  3. Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywher

Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywher

游客2023-12-11  23
问题                 Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession?
    People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the October 1929 stock market crash and lasted until the United States entered World War II. It is a vivid story of year upon year of despair. This Depression narrative, however, is not merely a story about the past: it has started to inform our current expectations .
    According to the Reuters—University of Michigan Survey of Consumers earlier this month, nearly two-thirds of consumers expected that the present downturn would last for five more years. President Obama, in his first press conference, evoked the Depression in warning of a "negative spiral" that "becomes difficult for us to get out of" and suggested the possibility of a " lost decade" as in Japan in the1990s. He said Congress needed to pass an economic stimulus package.
    The attention paid to the Depression story may seem a logical consequence of our economic situation. But the retelling, in fact, is a cause of the current situation—because the Great Depression serves as a model for our expectations, damping what John Maynard Keynes called our "animal spirits" reducing consumers’ willingness to spend and businesses’ willingness to hire and expand. The Depression narrative could easily end up as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The popular response to vivid accounts of past depressions is partly psychological, but it has a rational base. We have to look at past episodes because economic theory, lacking the physical constants of the hard sciences, has never offered a complete account of the mechanics of depressions.
    To understand the story’s significance in driving our thinking, it is important to recognize that the Great Depression itself was partly driven by the retelling of earlier depression stories. In the 1930s, there was incessant talk about the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s: each of those downturns lasted for the better part of a decade.
    In his influential 1909 book, "Forty Years of American Finance," Alexander Dana Noyes argued that the depressions of the 1870s and the 1890s might have lasted much longer, except for accidents of history—a " European famine and a bumper crop at home " which stimulated the domestic economy through its agricultural sector. Early in the Depression, Forrest Davis worried in "What Price Wall Street?" that weakness after the panic of 1907 might have led to a prolonged depression if not for the accident of the World War. In 1932, a review of this book in The Times mourned that Mr. Davis had given us "no especial assurance that any of the traditional accidents can save us once more. The last war showed how terrible the next war will he."
    Should President Obama have reinforced the Great Depression story? Perhaps he had to take that risk to promote the economic stimulus plan, and not just hope for some accident to save us. The story was already embedded in our consciousness, and will be with us until we see a real, solid boost from the stimulus package and its likely successors. [br] In the author’s opinion. Obama should______.
选项 A、guide people to realize the severity of the situation
B、get prepared for coping with accidents
C、promote the economic stimulus plan
D、cease people’s Depression talks
答案 C
解析 本题考查作者观点。文章最后一段对奥巴马该怎样应对当前形势提出建议。首句以设问的方式提出奥巴马要不要强调大萧条的故事来凸显目前的严峻形势，第二句给出了答案：或许他应该冒险推动经济刺激方案，而非等着有什么意外事件来拯救我们。可见[C]正确。排除[A]、[B]。由最后一句可知，人们在看到经济稳步推进之前不可能停止谈论大萧条，[D]错误。
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