时事资讯:美国经济已对刺激计划上瘾

【英文原文】

America and Its Junky, Junkie Economy

'Now the drugs don't work. They just make you worse.' ─ The Verve

It's the day every junkie dreads. And ours is coming soon. America must learn to live without all the drugs we've been feeding ourselves.

We've been on one heck of a binge ─ the TARP, the TALF, the FHA's Hope for Homeowners, Cash-for-Clunkers ─ more than $4 trillion of it so far.

And while there is little doubt that the junk has made us feel better, you have to wonder if it's still working.

Today's existing-home sales numbers suggest it may not be. After rising four months in a row, August home re-sales fell unexpectedly by 2.7% to 5.1 million annual sales.

A 'mild retreat' said the National Association of Realtors. But apparently it wasn't 'mild' enough for the Dow which promptly swung from a 50 point gain to a 50 point loss on the news.

Investors don't like when things that are supposed to happen don't. And home sales are supposed to keep rising, especially when the Fed and the U.S. government are doing everything they can to juice them.

For America's homebuyers, credit is certainly available. The Federal Housing Agency has insured so many dubious mortgages that it's already fallen below its legally-mandated reserves.

Mortgage rates are low: the Fed's purchases of over a trillion dollars in mortgages have seen to that. For August, the rate on a 30 year mortgage was an astonishing 5.19%.

And there's even 'free money' available: Until November 30th, first-time homebuyers qualify for an $8,000 tax credit. We're back to buying $150,000 homes for only a few thousand dollars down.

So with all these inducements, how could home sales have possibly declined?

Well, it could be just a statistical blip ─ 'bad weather kept buyers at home' as the retailers are fond of saying. Or it could be that all our Keynesian tinkering is messing with the natural balance of supply and demand. Once you start introducing one-off special incentives, things get unpredictable when you take them away.

That's what happened with the $3 billion Cash-for-Clunkers program. The $4,500 government subsidy produced a great July and August for car sales, but September is dismal. As Edmunds.com CEO Jeremy Anwyl put it: 'Cash for Clunkers was supposed to prime the pump, but that is a physics concept, and economics is quite different. Demand has dropped off significantly since the program ended.'

Is the August drop in home sales the result of the coming expiry of the $8,000 tax credit or of the FHA finally starting to tighten credit? We don't know.

But we do know that no matter how badly we crave them, the drugs in fact can make you worse. Just look at what the Fed's easy money, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and all those subprime mortgages did to us not too long ago. It almost killed us.

But how quickly we forget. The National Association of Homebuilders and the National Association of Realtors have already started their predictable campaigns for the extension of the $8,000 homebuyer credit.

No surprise. Whether you're in Washington on Wall Street or Main Street, there are always some junkies that refuse to go into rehab.