《每日邮报》|我警告过必将来临的战役
2008 年 12 月 13 日，我撰文预测“下一场战役将围绕政府信用和货币实力展开”。
On December 13, 2008, I wrote an article predicting that 'the next battle will be over the creditworthiness of governments and the strength of currencies'.
上周接受 BBC 采访者提问时，被问及是否对意大利和西班牙借贷成本逼近不可持续水平感到意外，我说我从未将希腊“纾困”方案视为欧元区问题的终结。
When asked by a BBC interviewer last week whether I was surprised that Italy and Spain were finding their borrowing costs heading towards unsustainable levels, I said I had never hailed the Greek 'bailout' package as the end of the eurozone's problems.
原因有三：
There were three reasons:
• 希腊的债务与 GDP（或国民收入）之比，依然高到自身承受不起。
• It still left Greece with a level of debt to GDP (or national income) it could not support.
• 欧盟领导人声明称希腊方案是特例，不会适用于其他国家，这使得葡萄牙、爱尔兰、意大利和西班牙暴露在类似问题之下。
• The statement of EU leaders that the Greek package was a unique solution and would not be applied to other countries left Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain exposed to similar problems.
• 尽管各路报纸专栏和电视评论员对方案条款连篇累牍地讨论，我没有看到任何关于希腊如何从根本上改革经济以防止问题重演的论述。就算看到了，我也不会信。
• Despite the torrent of column inches and outpourings of TV pundits about the terms of the package, nowhere had I read any statement about how the Greeks would fundamentally change their economy to prevent a recurrence of the problem. Not that I would have believed it if I had.
美国当年打朝鲜战争和越南战争，依据的是“多米诺骨牌理论”——如果共产主义中国能在那里推动政权更迭，邻国也会像一排多米诺骨牌那样接连倒向共产主义，直到蔓延至印度等国。那个理论是错的，但它将适用于欧元区主权债务。
America fought wars in Korea and Vietnam over 'the domino theory' that if communist China could engineer regime change there, neighbouring states would also fall to communism, like a line of dominoes, until it had spread to countries such as India. That theory was wrong, but it will apply to eurozone sovereign debt.
希腊纾困方案没有、也不会像爱尔兰的方案那样遏制住问题，因为欧元存在致命缺陷。没有单一权威机构制定、覆盖欧元区各国的单一预算来支撑，就不可能实现单一货币。
A rescue package for Greece has not and will not contain the problem any more than the package for Ireland did, because the euro is fatally flawed. It is impossible to have a single currency without a single budget set by a single authority covering the states in the eurozone to support it.
欧元的问世让欧洲政府债券的投资者想当然地认为，所有以欧元计价的政府债券具有相似的信用风险。这种想法显然荒谬——并没有一个由单一欧洲预算支持的单一发行机构。
The advent of the euro led investors in European government bonds to assume that all euro-denominated government bonds had similar credit risks. This was clearly nonsense without a single issuing authority that was funded by a single European budget.
然而，这个错误假设导致欧元区各国的借贷利率趋同，向财政最稳健的德国靠拢。
However, this erroneous assumption led the interest rates at which eurozone countries could borrow to converge toward the lower borrowing costs of the most conservatively run - Germany.
结果，欧元区外围经济体——“欧猪五国”（葡萄牙、爱尔兰、意大利、希腊和西班牙）——一直靠低成本债务过着狂欢的日子。
As a result, the economies of the peripheral eurozone countries, the 'PIIGS' - Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain - have been on low-cost debt-fuelled binges.
毫不意外，低利率在爱尔兰和西班牙等国催生了规模惊人的房地产泡沫。
Unsurprisingly, low interest rates have produced housing bubbles of impressive proportions in some countries such as Ireland and Spain.
无限制的廉价借贷让这些国家的政府可以通过赤字运作来买选票，供养越来越多的公共部门就业人口，向民众做出越来越不切实际的承诺，尤其是在养老金方面，有些国家还把逃税这一国民消遣也掺和进来。
Access to unlimited cheap borrowing allowed the governments of these countries to buy votes by running deficits to fund an increasing proportion of their population employed by the public sector, to make increasingly unsupportable commitments to their populations, particularly in the area of pensions, and to combine this in some cases with the national pastime of tax evasion.
在这些根本性的大问题得到解决之前，任何零敲碎打的措施都解决不了欧元区危机。
None of the piecemeal measures being proposed will solve the eurozone crisis until these massive fundamental problems are addressed.
Terry Smith
Terry Smith