Reminds me a little of some of the Wavoids.
They are told from the unsafe harbour to get excited because Wave's software is about to be adopted. "We own Europe", "June is ours." etc. They say - our time has come.
Other folks say, look, this is a long road with obstacles in it. Don't get too excited. Wait for some signs of progress in the numbers. Look for the empirical evidence, not the puff.
Yet these cautions are inevitably dismissed.
A decade goes by.
Finally, things look like they are turning in a better direction. Obstacles finally navigated. And the optimistic Wavoids, whose theories predicted nothing but imminent success, shout in unison - "Vindication! At last."
Irony!
If we enter an inflationary environment in two years, I wasn't wrong about the past. The right policy in 2008-2011 was to acknowledge the reality we have existed in and to develop the policies to combat it. The problem we have faced is the failure of demand in a deflationary environment in which asset values have collapsed (stocks, houses) and trust in the financial system has eroded significantly. The government needed to respond. QE was one of these responses. Stimulus was another. There was little time to produce perfection, and indeed, what was produced was over the objections of the Republican party.
It's rather pitiful to think this is a game and that the game is still on. Economies are managed in real time and have real consequences for people. The present is the issue. The game analogy, with its time component (waiting for circumstances to change to justify a position which was applied to earlier circumstances), is just a form of denial by delay.
| 