Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, turned the tables on her international critics yesterday by accusing the US and other governments of making “cheap money” a central tool of their economic management, thus planting the seeds of a similar crisis in five years.
德国总理安格拉•默克尔(Angela Merkel)昨日对国际批评人士作出回击。她指责美国和其他国家政府将“廉价资金”作为经济管理的主要工具，从而埋下了在5年后爆发类似危机的种子。

“Excessively cheap money in the US was a driver of today’s crisis,” the chancellor told the German parliament. “I am deeply concerned about whether we are now reinforcing this trend through measures being adopted in the US and elsewhere and whether we could find ourselves in five years facing the exact same crisis.”
默克尔向德国议会表示：“美国过度廉价的资金是促成今日危机的原因之一。我深深担忧，我们现在是否在通过美国和其他地区正在采取的措施巩固这一趋势，我们5年后是否会面对完全一样的危机。”

It is the first time Ms Merkel has confronted her critics head-on. There have been calls from outside the country for Germany to beef up its fiscal support to the economy, in part because its vast current account surplus and healthy public finances give it more room for manoeuvre than other European nations.
这是默克尔首次正面迎击她的批评者。外界一直呼吁德国加强对经济的财政支持，其中部分原因在于，德国庞大的经常账户盈余和健康的公共财政，令其拥有比其他欧洲国家更大的行动空间。

Yet Ms Merkel has been wary of raising public borrowing to stimulate demand. She fears the extra income could boost Germans’ already high savings rate while physical bottlenecks may prevent massive rises in infrastructure budgets being spent.
但默克尔一直不愿通过增加政府借款来刺激需求。她担心，额外的收入可能会提高德国本已处于高位的储蓄率，而物质瓶颈也许会阻碍基建预算开支的大幅增长。

The chancellor defended her government’s modest fiscal stimulus – worth