[工学]2009河北工业大学博士英语答案.docVIP

TEXT B ??? Pundits who want to sound judicious are fond of warning against generalizin g. Each country is different, they say, and no one story fits all of Asia. This is, of course, silly: all of these economies plunged into economic crisis within a few months of each other, so they must have had something in common. ??? In fact, the logic of catastrophe was pretty much the same in Thailand, Mal aysia, Indonesia and South Korea. (Japan is a very different story. ) In each ca se investors——mainly, but not entirely, foreign banks who had made short-term loans——all tried to pull their money out at the same time. The result was a co mbined banking and currency crisis: a banking crisis because no bank can convert? all its assets into cash on short notice; a currency crisis because panicked in vestors were trying not only to convert long-term assets into cash, but to conve rt baht or rupiah into dollars. In the face of the stampede, governments had no good options. If they let their currencies plunge inflation would soar and compa nies that had borrowed in dollars would go bankrupt; if they tried to support th eir currencies by pushing up interest rates, the same firms would probably go bu st from the combination of debt burden and recession. In practice, countries’ s plit the difference—— and paid a heavy price regardless. ??? Was the crisis a punishment for bad economic management? Like most cliches,? the catchphrase“ crony capitalism” has prospered because it gets at something r eal: excessively cozy relationships between government and business really did l ead to a lot of bad investments. The still primitive financial structure of Asia n business also made the economies peculiarly vulnerable to a loss of confidence . But the punishment was surely disproportionate to the crime, and many investme nts that look foolish in retrospect seemed sensible at the time. ??? Given that there were no good policy options, was the policy response mainl y on the fight track? T