跟读练习: The Inflation Problem... It's Worse Than You Think - 通过视频学习英语口语

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Right now, everyone's blaming inflation on the Middle East.

That's the narrative we're being told and everyone's accepted it.

And it makes sense why.

It's easy to follow.

There's a clean cause and a clean effect.

It's so simple you can draw it on a napkin.

Except there's one problem with this story.

The Federal Reserve keeps its own inflation scoreboard.

They don't use the number you see in the headlines.

They target 2% inflation measured by personal consumption expenditures, the PCE.

That's the scoreboard that counts.

That's also where the mainstream story falls apart.

The conflict in the Middle East started in February, just five months ago, but the Federal Reserve's measure has now missed the inflation target for 63 months in a row,

more than five years straight.

The PCE currently sits at a little over 4%, more than double the Fed's target, and is continuing to climb,

so everyone's using a five-month-old story to diagnose a five-year-old problem.

And this isn't just a number that only matters to economists.

This single number lies at the foundation of every economic decision in the United States, And every rate you pay is priced off what people expect that number to be.

Your mortgage, your car loan, what your savings account pays you, what the cash in your wallet is worth next year.

So it's worth asking, what's actually going on?

Because there's clearly more to the inflation story.

Inflation in this country used to move like a pendulum.

It would swing up, swing back down, and eventually come to rest around that 2% number.

You never questioned it, because you never had to.

even had a name for this period of American history, the Great Moderation.

From 1985 to 2007, growth was steady, inflation was low, and the whole economy looked like it regulated itself.

Except it didn't.

There was no invisible hand.

There was a real one, someone standing beside the pendulum, giving it a firm push back toward the middle every single time it swung too far,

done so reliably for so long that everyone forgot the pendulum was being pushed at all.

That's what the last five years are actually about.

The thing doing the pushing is now the one in trouble.

But before we get there, we need to look closer at that 2% number itself.

For a number the entire financial system is anchored to, you'd assume it fell out of some impossibly complex math equation,

or it was carved in stone and passed down generations.

Well, neither.

Somebody chose it.

So why the 2%?

Here's St. Louis Federal Reserve economist Christopher Neely explaining how they landed on that 2% target number.

When central banks were considering what sort of an inflation rate to target,

they were really trading off the costs of having inflation with the benefits of having some upward movement in prices,

which might have benefits in terms of allowing central banks to stabilize the macroeconomy.

So 2% was kind of a happy medium.

So while the target number itself may have come from an arbitrary decision, there's still reasoning behind it.

But why not go lower?

Why not go to zero?

That's the obvious question.

If inflation's the thing quietly making everything more expensive, why aim for any of it at all?

Because while on paper, a zero percent inflation rate sounds great, in reality, it's not.

When a recession hits, the Fed's main move is to cut interest rates.

In a world with zero inflation, rates already sit near the floor.

So the second a real economic downturn arrives, the Fed gets one cut, maybe two, and then slams into zero, structurally trapped and out of road.

That's how an ordinary recession can spiral into a decade-long depression.

But you can't aim too high either.

Push it to 4%, and prices double every 18 years.

Businesses can't forecast their cost, and nobody can price a long-term contract without guessing.

So 2% is that Goldilocks number, high enough to keep a cushion between the economy and catastrophe, low enough that you barely notice it on an ordinary Tuesday.

But actually hitting that number, year after year, is close to impossible.

It takes a balancing act so unforgiving, it would make Evel Knievel sweat.

And for the last few decades, the Fed made this balancing act look effortless.

We're just now finding out how easy it was, now that things have changed.

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Now back to the Federal Reserve's World Class Balancing Act.

For the last few decades, we managed to control inflation.

The walk towards the 2% target looked effortless.

But it only looked effortless because the tightrope was 6 inches off the ground.

And the only reason we know that is because we've seen what the same walk looks like 60 feet up.

But I'm trying to be a more positive guy these days.

So before I show you the ugly, let me show you the good part.

Back when the Feds still had room to work with.

Let's rewind to the late 70s.

Inflation wasn't drifting anymore.

It was sprinting.

It peaked at over 13.5%.

At that pace, prices double in about nine years.

The dollar in your pocket was rotting while you held it, and every single person could feel it happening.

So who do you call when inflation is out of control?

No. Not Ghostbusters.

You call 6'7", cigar-smoking Paul Volcker, the kind of man who looks like he eats recessions for breakfast.

100

Volcker takes over as Fed chair in 1979 and does the one thing nobody else had the stomach for.

101

He drives interest rates to 20%.

102

He deliberately triggers not one recession, but two, back to back, strangling the money supply until inflation has nothing left to feed on.

103

It was so aggressive, it earned a name of its own, the Volcker Shock.

104

And it worked.

105

Inflation went from over 13.5% down to bottoming out under 2% in the late 80s.

106

So take a look at the timeline.

107

From 1980 to 1983, Volcker tightens monetary policy aggressively, triggers two back to back recessions and successfully drops inflation by more than 10 points.

108

Two years later, the United States enters the Great Moderation Era, a 23-year-long period defined by steady growth and historically low economic volatility.

109

Which raises the obvious question, the one probably forming in your head right now, if it worked for Volcker, why can't the Fed just run the same playbook again today?

110

It's because he had one advantage nobody talks about, the country could absorb the damage.

111

When Volcker first claimed the throne, the national debt was about a quarter the size of the economy.

112

By today's standards, pretty much nothing.

113

So when he drove rates to 20%, it was brutal, but it was clean.

114

Raising rates did the one thing he intended it to do, slam the brakes.

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But that world is gone.

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The national debt is now sitting around 100% of GDP, a one-to-one match with the entire economy.

117

The last time it was this high was the Second World War, but the number is only half of it.

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The other half is what the number does.

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When the Fed raises rates now, it presses down in two places at once.

120

The first is the breaks.

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Higher rates, pricier loans, less borrowing and a slower economy.

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Simple.

123

The second is hidden underneath and quietly emerges by accident.

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Higher rates also mean the government pays more interest on what it already owes.

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And that bill is not small.

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Net interest is running around a trillion dollars a year, more than the entire military budget.

127

In 2021, interest ate about 9% of every dollar the federal government collected.

128

This year, it's 19%.

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But those interest payments don't just vanish from the economy.

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It lands in the hands of the pension funds, banks, foreign governments, and other investors who lent the US government money in the first place.

131

So every time the Fed raises rates to cool the economy down, it also raises the size of the check that gets written and paid out, which then gets spent, lended out,

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or rolled into the next bond at the new higher rate.

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Which basically means the same move that's supposed to pull money out of the economy starts quietly sending it back in.

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So one foot presses the brake, the other one quietly presses the gas.

135

And the heavier the debt, the harder that second foot pushes.

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At 25% of GDP, you barely feel it.

137

At 100%, both pedals are floored and the brake is wired to the accelerator.

138

Two economists saw this danger coming in 1981.

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Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace predicted it in one of the most influential macroeconomic papers of the last 50 years.

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While the title doesn't exactly scream page turner, and it's not exactly the easiest read.

141

In fact, I'd probably rather watch paint dry than read through it a second time.

142

The stuff inside it is very interesting.

143

They warn that if the government never runs a surplus, the central bank can't make the debt smaller.

144

All it gets to decide is what form the debt takes, bonds or cash.

145

Those are the two options.

146

So when the Fed fights inflation, it's squeezing the cash side, which means the bond side has to grow to make up the difference.

147

And bonds pay interest.

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So the longer the Fed holds the line, the faster that pile of debt compounds.

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So the tightening that brings inflation down today is the same thing that forces somebody to print later.

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Meaning the Fed isn't actually addressing the root of the problem.

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They're not actually fighting the inflation, they're just postponing it.

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And if you think this is just some doomer theory from 1981 with no bearing on today, well guess what?

153

A few weeks ago the new Fed chair Kevin Warsh launched five new task forces to tackle different economic problems.

154

One of them is an inflation frameworks task force to reassess how the Fed measures, understands, and responds to structural drivers of inflation.

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Three people were picked to lead this team.

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One of them is Thomas Sargent.

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The man who co-wrote the paper from 45 years ago is

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now being asked by the Fed to lead a team tackling the inflation issues.

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So inflation is clearly a concern for the Federal Reserve.

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But when you step outside and look around, it's quiet.

161

Gas got cheaper last month.

162

The headlines said cooling, you might even think this whole thing already sorted itself out.

163

But the thing people forget is the ground is always the last thing to shake.

164

By the time you feel an earthquake under your feet, the fault lines slipped a while ago and the impact's already on its way to you.

165

The inflation numbers you see in the headlines are that ground.

166

They move last.

167

Housing is the clearest example.

168

It's more than 35% of the entire basket the headline number is built on, and it's the slowest moving piece in it, because rents lock in for a year and reset in steps.

169

So a big chunk of today's reading is measuring pressure that was released months ago.

170

When the headlines say everything's calm, it's telling you the ground held.

171

Yesterday.

172

Waiting on the inflation number means finding out last.

173

You need to work backwards to get to the truth.

174

When you strip everything away, inflation is one thing, price is going up.

175

But a price only goes up if somebody actually pays the higher one.

176

And nobody pays more without having more to pay with.

177

So the money moves first.

178

Every time.

179

And there's a number that measures exactly that.

180

It's called M2.

181

It's one of the main ways economists measure how much money is sloshing around the system.

182

Think of it as all the cash within arm's reach of the economy.

183

After 2020, the line goes pretty much vertical.

184

The M2 money supply is currently growing at over 5.5% a year, the fastest pace since July 2022.

185

But money doesn't reappear on its own, somebody has to put it there.

186

So if inflation's the enemy, who exactly is quietly pumping fresh dollars back into the system?

187

The answer's the Federal Reserve.

188

To see how, you need to understand the least understood tool the Fed owns.

189

Forget interest rates for a second.

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There's a second lever.

191

This one's hidden in the back of Jerome Powell's closet, and it only comes out in case of an emergency.

192

It's a literal money printer.

193

When the economy's dying, like in 2020, the Fed creates money out of thin air and uses it to buy bonds, pushing that new money into the system to keep it alive.

194

That flood of new money is called quantitative easing, and in the pandemic, they ran it harder than at any point in history.

195

The Fed's balance sheet went from around $4 trillion to nearly $9 trillion in about two years, leading to inflation spiking to over 9% in June 2022.

196

But when inflation caught fire, the Fed was forced to do something they've only done twice in its more than 100-year history.

197

They ran the money printer in reverse.

198

Instead of creating money to buy bonds, the Fed let the bonds it already held expire and didn't replace them.

199

Every month, a little less money in the system than the month before.

200

This policy is called quantitative tightening, and it started in June of 2022.

201

Over the next three and a half years, the Fed took more than $2.2 trillion off its balance sheet.

202

It worked well enough that the money supply itself contracted, which sounds minor, but it's not.

203

The last time the amount of money in the American economy meaningfully shrank was the Great Depression.

204

But you also can't tighten forever.

205

The United States financial system needs a certain amount of cash just sitting in it to function day to day, and if you drain past that line, things start breaking.

206

So on December 1st of last year, the Fed announced quantitative tightening was over.

207

They'd successfully taken out about half of the more than $5 trillion that was injected in the financial system during the pandemic.

208

But then Jerome Powell snuck back out of the closet and turned the engine back on.

209

Eleven days later, on December 12th, the Fed started buying bonds again, around $40 billion a month.

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The balance sheet it spent three and a half years draining is now refilling.

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So all this leaves us with a country running two very different stories at the same time.

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The first one shows up in the monthly reports, the headline numbers.

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That's the story everybody argues about, and you get a new story every 30 days.

214

The second runs underneath all of it, the structural stuff.

215

The Congressional Budget Office now estimates the deficit for this fiscal year will reach $1.4 trillion.

216

That's 5.8% of the entire economy and far above the previous 50-year average of 3.8%.

217

The total national debt is closing in on $40 trillion, and the interest we pay on that debt is now over a trillion dollars a year.

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In 2021, interest ate about 9 cents out of every dollar the federal government collected.

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This year it's 19.

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It more than doubled in five years.

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Interest is now the third largest line in the entire federal budget.

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We spend more on it than we spend on the entire military.

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The debt snowball is playing out exactly as Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace warned.

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So how do we actually fix this mess?

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The best answer I've seen comes from the golden boy of the finance world, Warren Buffett.

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He was asked how he would deal with the deficit.

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Here's what he said.

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I get in the deficit in five minutes.

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How?

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You just pass a law that says that anytime there's a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.

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Now you've got the incentives in the right place, right?

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So it's capable of being done.

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A law that bars every sitting member of Congress from re-election anytime the deficit runs past 3% of GDP.

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He was laughing when he said it, but he's also completely right.

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We have an incentives problem.

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It's not just a problem on the left, or just a problem on the right.

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It's an American problem.

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Both parties do it.

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Think about how somebody actually gets a job in Congress.

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They campaign on promises, telling you they'll do this and that, because that's what wins.

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Nobody builds a career in Congress promising people less, so the incentives only point one direction, spending more.

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Which is how the national deficit has run past 3% of GDP for pretty much the entire 21st century.

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It hasn't just been an expensive couple of years, it's structural spending.

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We've been spending more than we bring in for a quarter of a century straight.

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The problem with going down this path is, it compounds.

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The more we borrow, the more interest we owe.

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The more interest we owe, the more we have to borrow.

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It's a never-ending, repeating cycle.

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We're on an unsustainable path that will eventually have to come to an end.

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And every year we put this off, the bill to deal with it just gets bigger.

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I'm curious to hear where other people land on this.

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Is this something we need to deal with now, or are people crashing out over nothing?

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Drop a comment and let me know.

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I'll be reading through them.

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Maybe Buffett's plan is too extreme.

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Or maybe it isn't extreme enough.

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We can argue about the right solution all day, but what we can't argue about is that this doesn't fix itself.

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Something eventually has to change.

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本课的词汇与口语要点

这节 B2 级别的口语课以视频“The Inflation Problem... It's Worse Than You Think”为素材。视频中反复出现的词有：inflation, Fed, rate, interest。这段视频共有 258 个句子、3195 个单词可供跟读。讲话部分时长为 16:44。说话人语速较快，每分钟约 191 个词，会出现较多连读和弱读。 84% 的单词属于英语最常用的 3,000 词，其余的词建议在练习前先学一下。

视频中的重点词汇

视频中最难的 15 个单词，附发音和释义：

单词	发音	释义
inflation 名词	/ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/	通貨膨脹 /通货膨胀, 通脹 /通胀
headline 名词	/ˈhɛd.laɪn/	標題 /标题
deficit 名词	/ˈdɛfəsɪt/	赤字, 亏损
recession 名词	/ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/	衰退, 退去
quietly 副词	/ˈkwaɪ.ɪt.li/	悄悄地, 安靜地 /安静地
economist 名词	/iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/	經濟學家 /经济学家
pendulum 名词	/ˈpɛnd͡ʒələm/	鐘擺 /钟摆, 擺 /摆
quantitative 形容词	/ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/	量的, 數量的 /数量的
incentive 名词	/ɪnˈsɛntɪv/	刺激, 誘因 /诱因
scoreboard 名词		記分牌 /记分牌
printer 名词	/ˈpɹɪntɚ/	印刷者
borrow 动词	/ˈbɑɹ.oʊ/	借, 貸 /贷
warn 动词	/woɹn/	警告, 提醒
slam 动词	/ˈslæm/	甩, 甩上
compound 名词	/ˈkɑmpaʊnd/	化合物

视频中出现的短语动词

单词	发音	释义
find out 动词		找出, 查明
go up 动词		上昇 /上升, 上去
back down 动词		做出讓步 /做出让步
check out 动词		退房
go down 动词		下降, 下去
look around 动词		環顧 /环顾
make up 动词	/ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/	組成 /组成
run around 动词		忙碌, 奔忙

值得反复跟读的句子

视频中简短而完整的句子，可以直接用在日常对话里：

They only collect what's necessary to connect you.
There's also your phone number.
I'll be reading through them.

视频中的语法

说话人最常用的结构，并附上视频中的原话：

结构	视频中的用法
现在完成进行时 have/has been + -ing — 以前开始、现在仍在继续的动作	we've been talking · We've been spending
被动语态 be + 过去分词 — 强调发生了什么，而不是谁做的	being told · is priced · being pushed
现在完成时 have/has + 过去分词 — 过去发生但与现在仍有关联的事	has now missed · have changed · we've seen
定语从句 who / which + 从句 — 补充说明人或事物	man who looks · side, which means · man who co

需要注意的发音

说话人用了 40 次缩略和弱读形式，例如 can't, doesn't, isn't。请按听到的简短形式来说。

“th” 音: underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, throne /θɹəʊ̯n/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/
“sh” 和 “zh” 音: inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, recession /ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/, structural /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/, cushion /ˈkʊʃən/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/
长单词——注意重音位置: economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/, quantitative /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/, accelerator /əkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪ.tɚ/, catastrophe /kəˈtæstɹəfi/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/

中文母语者容易读错的音：

/v/ — 不要读成 /w/，上齿轻触下唇: quantitative /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/, incentive /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/, lever /ˈliː.və/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/, investor /ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/
词尾辅音 — 要读清楚，后面不要加元音: deficit /ˈdɛfəsɪt/, economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/, effortless /ˈɛfə(ɹ)tlɪs/, quantitative /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/, incentive /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/
/r/ 和 /l/ 的区别: effortless /ˈɛfə(ɹ)tlɪs/, structural /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/, accelerator /əkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪ.tɚ/, literal /ˈlɪt(ə)ɹəl/, spiral /ˈspaɪɹəl/

如何用这段视频练习

先完整听一遍视频，不要开口，记下不认识的单词。
先用 0.75 倍速逐句跟读，熟练之后再回到正常速度。
录下自己的声音并与原声对比，特别注意 inflation, headline, deficit 这类单词。

什么是跟读法？

跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。

影子跟读法: 阅读完整分步指南 →

跟读练习: The Inflation Problem... It's Worse Than You Think - 通过视频学习英语口语

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