The summit of the Group of 20 leading advanced and emerging countries in London on April 2 2009 will fail. Its members are refusing to meet what Lawrence Summers, senior economic adviser to the US president Barack Obama, calls “the universal demand agenda”. Conventional wisdom is the enemy. Alas, it is winning.
In the US, the spirit of Andrew Mellon, Treasury secretary to Herbert Hoover, remains alive. His advice – lamented Hoover – was: “liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate”. Yet this foolish view is not animating US policy. The danger is not of doing nothing, but rather of doing too little. If such timidity fails, opponents will argue: these policies have failed. This will exacerbate confusion, making attempts at decisive action later on more difficult and ineffective.
在美国，赫伯特•胡佛(Herbert Hoover)政府财政部长安德鲁•梅隆(Andrew Mellon)的精神依然保持着活力。他的建议——让胡佛懊恼不已——是：“清算劳工，清算股票，清算农场主，清算房地产”。但这种愚蠢的观点并没有给美国的政策带来生命力。现在的危险不是什么也不做，而是做得太少。如果这种缩手缩脚的做法失败了，反对者就会提出：这些政策失败了。这将加深人们的困惑，让以后采取果断行动的尝试变得更加困难，更没有效果。