14 January 2014 - slow recovery

Even when you know better, you don’t know better. At the height of the financial crisis, I read a spate of articles explaining that recovery from this kind of crunch was historically much slower and more difficult than recovery from other economic problems. Before long, the tide turned and the only opinions to be found lamented the unexpectedly slow and difficult recovery. Even the Fed’s models, developed by experts who know their economic history, were tuned to modern non-crisis data and called for a quicker turnaround. So close your eyes, take a deep breath, and accept reality. It will be ten or fifteen years before our organizations have digested the immediate lessons, and in the meantime, all we have is urgency to fix the damn problems right damn now.