软着陆与硬着陆：美联储，1965—2022年

中文摘要

“软着陆”是指中央银行为抑制通货膨胀而收紧货币政策、但未引发经济衰退的情形（若引发经济衰退，则属于“硬着陆”）。人们认为，软着陆难以实现且极为罕见。按照传统观点，美联储在过去60年里仅实现过一次软着陆，即1994—1995年的那一次。本文研究了美联储自1965年以来的11次货币政策收紧，并得出结论：美联储的历史表现比上述观点所认为的更好——只要软着陆的判定标准不过于严格，且美联储当时确实在努力让经济实现软着陆，美联储就曾多次取得成功。然而，实现软着陆既需要管理货币政策的技巧，也需要没有不利的外部冲击。

Abstract

“Soft landings,” that is, cases in which the central bank tightens monetary policy to fight inflation but does not cause a recession (which would be a “hard landing”, are thought to be difficult to achieve and extremely rare. According to the conventional wisdom, the Federal Reserve has managed to achieve only one soft landing in the past 60 years—in 1994–1995. This paper studies the eleven episodes of monetary policy tightening by the Fed since 1965, and concludes that the central bank has a better record than that—that as long as the criteria for softness are not too stringent, and Fed was actually trying to land the economy softly, the Fed has succeeded several times. Achieving a soft landing, however, requires both skill in managing monetary policy and the absence of adverse external shocks.