During his State of the Union speech, on Tuesday night, Donald Trump took credit for the country’s strong rate of job creation, its rising wages, and the lowest unemployment rate in many years. Meanwhile, Janet Yellen, the person primarily responsible for these things, was preparing to leave her post as the chair of the Federal Reserve Board.
周二晚上的国情咨文中，唐纳德·特朗普因国家创造了大量新就业岗位、工资上涨和失业率多年最低而为人称赞。同时，珍妮特·耶伦，这个立了大功的人，正准备离开美联储主席这个职位。
On Wednesday, she chaired her final meeting of the central bank’s policy-making arm, and Friday will be her last day at the Fed. On Monday morning, Jay Powell—a Republican, investment banker, and current member of the Fed's board—will be sworn in as her successor. In a more just world, Yellen would have been given a second four-year term, as most of her (male) predecessors were. But late last year Trump decided to replace her with Powell.
周三，她主持了最后一场央行政策会议，周五将是她在美联储的最后一天。下周一早上，共和党人、投资银行家和现在美联储董事会成员杰·鲍威尔将宣誓继任。要是世道公正，耶伦本该再干四年，她多数男性前任者都是如此。可去年末，特朗普决定用鲍威尔把她换下来。
Having spent fourteen years at the Fed, and having been the first woman to lead it in its hundred-and-five-year history, Yellen is leaving with a record of high achievement. A fiercely smart academic economist—she holds a Ph.D. from Yale—she served as a loyal and able deputy to her predecessor at the Fed, Ben Bernanke.
耶伦在美联储干了14年，是美联储105年历史上第一个女性掌门人，她离开时成绩不俗。她拥有耶鲁博士学位，在学术界是顶呱呱的经济学家，在给前任本·伯南克当副手期间，她很忠诚，也很能干。
Upon taking the top job, she quickly demonstrated a mastery of the communicative and political skills that are necessary to run a large institution like the Fed. In speeches and at press conferences, she explained the Fed’s thinking clearly and carefully, doing her best not to lapse into the technical jargon beloved by economists. Her colleagues liked and respected her, and she charmed some key Republicans on Capitol Hill. (That helped to head off recent calls, emanating from some corners of the G.O.P., for an inquisitional audit of the Fed.)
做一把手后，她迅速表现出运行美联储这种大机构所需的交际和政治技巧。在演讲和新闻发布会上，她清晰且谨慎地解释美联储的想法，尽其所能不说经济学家喜欢用的行话。她的同事喜欢她，尊重她，她让国会里某些共和党大佬为之倾倒。（这平息了最近共和党一小撮人要求对美联储进行调查性审计的呼声。）
She even got along well with Trump, a fellow New York native. (Yellen grew up in Brooklyn.) Last November, when he announced that he would nominate Powell rather than keep Yellen for a second term, he said, “She’s a wonderful woman who’s done a terrific job.” This statement raised the question of why he didn’t leave Yellen in place. It was widely assumed that partisan politics were responsible: Yellen is a Democrat, and Barack Obama nominated her, in 2013. But there’s also another possibility. Trump may believe that, with Yellen out of the way, it will be easier for him to lay claim to some of her achievements.
她和纽约老乡特朗普也处得不错，耶伦在布鲁克林长大。去年11月，总统宣布提名鲍威尔而非让耶伦再干一任时说，“她是了不起的女人，工作干得很棒”。这一说法让人想不通，既然如此为什么不让她留任。大家推断这是党派政治的缘故：耶伦是民主党人，贝拉克·奥巴马2013年提名她做了美联储主席。但还有另一种可能，特朗普可能以为，撵走耶伦，他更容易把人家的功劳归到自己头上。
These achievements include overseeing a historic period of job creation. “Under Yellen, the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen the most of any Fed chair term in modern history,” the Washington Post’s Heather Long pointed out last month. In February, 2014, when Yellen took office, the unemployment rate was 6.7 per cent; today, it is 4.1 per cent. And almost three quarters of that decline came before Trump entered office.
这些功劳包括见证了历史性的就业增长。“在耶伦任中，美国失业率在现代历史美联储主席任期内下降幅度最大，”《华盛顿邮报》的希色·龙上月指出。2014年2月，耶伦就任时，失业率是6.7%，今天，4.1%。近四分之三的下降发生在特朗普就职之前。
It should also be noted that, when Yellen took office, most economists believed that an unemployment rate below five per cent, or thereabouts, would lead to inflation. If the unemployment rate fell below a certain key level, the textbooks said, prices would start rising. To head off an inflationary spiral, the Fed would have to step in and raise interest rates sharply—and such a move would risk a recession.
还要注意，耶伦就任时，多数经济学家认为失业率降到差不多5%以下，就会引发通货膨胀。教科书说，如果失业率降到一定水平之下，物价就会上涨。为了抵御通货大幅膨胀，美联储必须介入大幅提高利率，这一举动可能导致衰退。
Yellen disputed this mechanistic view. Citing the fact that millions of people had ceased looking for jobs during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009, she argued that the headline rate of unemployment was an inadequate measure of the state of the labor market, and that other metrics, such as the labor-force-participation rate, also needed to be taken into account.
耶伦反对这种机械的观点。她指出2007年到2009年发生大衰退后数百万人都不再找工作了，因此名义失业率不足以反映劳动力市场的真实情况，其他一些指标，如劳动力参与率，也需要考虑在内。
More controversially, she also argued that there could be important benefits to the Fed running a “high-pressure economy,” in which the unemployment rate was kept low and new hires were hard to find. In such a situation, Yellen speculated, in a 2016 speech, workers who had dropped out of the labor force could be drawn back in, firms could be incentivized to make capital investments, over-all demand in the economy could be higher, and wages and productivity growth—which were languishing badly—could pick up.
更具有争议的是，她还认为运转“高压经济”对美联储有重要的益处，所谓高压经济，就是把失业率压得很低，让公司很难找到人手。耶伦在2016年的讲话中预计，这种情况下，那些不工作的工人就会重新进入劳动力市场，激励公司进行资本投资，经济体总需求会增加，持续不振的工资和生产力开始增长。
This argument harkened back to one made during the nineteen-sixties by an earlier generation of Keynesian economists, including James Tobin, Yellen’s thesis supervisor, and Nicholas Kaldor, the British theorist and policy adviser.
这种论断可以追溯到六十年代的早期凯恩斯主义经济学家，包括耶伦的论文导师詹姆士·托宾和英国理论学家和政策顾问尼古拉斯·卡尔多。
With the rise of monetarism, new classical macroeconomics, and so-called New Keynesianism, this type of economics fell out of fashion. But, as Yellen perceived, it could perhaps hold the key to breaking the recent pattern of low growth, low rates of capital investment, and stagnant wages.
可随着货币主义、新古典主义宏观经济学和所谓新凯恩斯主义的兴起，这种经济学黯然失色。但如耶伦认为的那样，这一理论或许可以解决最近出现的低增长、低资本投资率和工资停滞现象。
The experience of the past eight years shows that it took a big dip in the unemployment rate for median household incomes to recover some of the losses they had suffered during the recession. Only when the jobless rate fell below the level previously considered safe did hourly wages rise by more than the inflation rate. Yellen welcomed these developments and sought to extend them rather than choke off growth prematurely.
过去八年的经验表明，失业率和家庭收入中位数跳水，用来弥补大衰退中的损失。因此只有失业率降到此前认为的安全线之下，时薪才能跑过通胀率。耶伦欢迎这些进展，并尝试推动它们，而非提早遏制增长。
Even now, in the ninth year of the post-2009 economic recovery, the federal funds rate is only 1.5 per cent. The rate of inflation, as indicatedby the Fed's preferred measure, is also just 1.5 per cent—below the Fed's official target of two per cent.
即便现在，后2009年经济复苏时代的第九年，美联储基金利率也只有1.5%。用美联储喜欢使用的统计方法，通胀率也只有1.5%，低于美联储2%的官方目标。
It could be argued—and it has been argued—that, with such a low inflation rate, the Fed has no business raising rates, even slowly. However, a case can also be made that the Fed’s expansionary policies are responsible for a stock-market boom that is now turning into a bubble. Sensitive to both of these critiques, Yellen’s Fed has been removing the monetary stimulus slowly, in baby steps.
可以这样说，其实也有人说了，在低通胀率情况下，美联储没有理由加息，甚至缓慢加息都没有必要。然而，美联储的扩张政策导致了牛市，现在股市已经出现泡沫。耶伦治理的美联储对这些批评很敏感，选择缓慢地退出货币刺激政策，小步快跑。
Thanks to Trump and the Republicans, the Fed now faces another challenge, in the form of an additional boost to the economy provided by a front-loaded tax cut. Should the Fed stick to its current policy stance and accommodate this new stimulus? Or should it perhaps accelerate its interest-rate hikes? Yellen won’t have to make that call.
因为特朗普和共和党人，美联储面临另一种挑战，先期减税给经济带来额外刺激。美联储应该坚持当前的政策立场并消化这种新刺激吗？或是应该加速加息？耶伦管不了那么多了。
The onus will be on Powell, who must be keenly aware that any hint of the Fed adopting a more hawkish approach will bring down upon him a Presidential Twitter fusillade and more—including the possibility of disruptions in the markets. Yellen certainly deserved another term, but she may be getting out at the right time.
现在责任属于鲍威尔，他必须保持清醒，美联储采取任何更加鹰牌立场的暗示都会让总统发推特臭骂他一顿，更糟糕的是还可能给市场带来破坏。耶伦当然应该再干一届，可现在退出可能刚好合适。
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