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  3. It may seem an odd time to worry about savings. This week the National Bure

It may seem an odd time to worry about savings. This week the National Bure

游客2024-05-30  19
问题      It may seem an odd time to worry about savings. This week the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the world’s, largest economy, America, had been in recession since December last year. The economies of Japan and much of Western Europe have been declining. A rapid, global, private-sector shift to thrift is exactly what the world economy does not need. That’s why governments around the world have been passing hurried measures to try to encourage people to spend more of their incomes.
     In some countries, they should. Asians (and Germans too), have been saving their money with excessive enthusiasm. But other countries’ citizens have been putting too little aside for their old age. In America,the household savings ratio (the proportion of disposable income not used for consumption) has been below 2.5% since 1999; in Britain, it has been below 3% in each of the past two years. The Asians’ thrift made the Anglo-Saxons’ extravagance possible. Through their Increasingly sophisticated financial systems, the Americans and British were able to borrow from the thrifty Asians to finance their spending. And, because their house prices were rising so fast, they had the confidence to do so.
     In other words, Anglo-Saxons were able to save their cake and eat it. They did not have to sacrifice consumption in order to build up assets for the future, because loose monetary policies encouraged borrowing that pushed up the prices of housing and other assets, which gave them the illusion of having saved enough. But now this debt burden is being unwound, asset prices are collapsing and savings rates are rising because consumers are unwilling, or unable, to borrow.
     Though this is bad news for the American and British economies in the short term, it ought to be good news in the long term. How good, though, depends as much on where people put their savings as on how much they put aside. [br] What caused the declining of asset prices and rising of saving rates?
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答案 Consumers are unwilling or unable to borrow.
解析 由定位句可知，导致目前资产价格的剧降和储蓄利率上升的原因是：消费者不愿意或者无能力借款。故正确答案是Consumers are unwilling or unable to borrow。
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