1 Reserve Bank 储备银行 2 cushion 缓冲垫,减震器 3 intervene 干预 4 contention 辩论 5 on balance 总的来说 6overshooting 过火,过激
下面我们听一遍巴里克拉克的谈话及中文翻译:
The Reserve Bank tries to play a role in providing a comfort cushion by intervening from time to time in the foreign exchange market with a view to limiting its more extreme fluctuations.
Whether the central bank should be doing this, and whether it actually can influence exchange rates in the face of market forces, are matters of some contention.
From its own analysis, the Reserve Bank is persuaded that, on balance, it plays a useful role in limiting overshooting in the market.
The first question is: can a central bank out-guess the market in terms of where the underlying market forces are taking the exchange rate? More interventiongs than not, I think, historically, have been when the central bank has been betting against the market. You may recall in 1992 when you had the upheavals in the European currencies, where there were a lot of bets against the markets and a lot of money was lost on the part of a lot of countries, including the Bank of England. So that basically, there's a real risk in central bank intervention.
I think central bank intervention is dangerous. They're betting on one side of the market and then that gives speculators a one-sided bet, because they know that they can't really lose by going on the other side.
Whenever you have a pegged exchange or a system like that, it has the tendency to let small problems accumulate into big ones and then to create a crisis.
And that is true, I may say, not only among small countries like Thailand or Korea. Great Britain in the 1950s and 60s several times had similar exchange crises arising from exactly the same thing, that it was trying to peg its currency, at that time under Bretton Woods, to the US dollar.
And its central bank was behaving in a way that was not consistent with that, and so, lo and behold, you had an exchange crisis and a devaluation.
弗里德曼在谈话中用了这样一些词汇和短语:
1 peg 固定,钉住 2 pegged exchange rate 固定汇率 3 tendency 趋势 4 accumulate 积累 5 lo and behold 看哪!瞧!