End of the Intermediate Trend?

[Hoofhurr]

That's an interesting perspective considering the last year or two. It seems the danger comes from both too tightly and too loosely to me and the fallout is the same regardless because growth, innovation, and employment seem to be in pretty bad shape currently. Would you attribute the current economy to a Fed that over-tightened things too much during the last decade? I understand your concerns but I'm confused about how you could be worried about over-tightening when it appears to me we've just been through a cycle of over-loosening and could use some tightening up. Granted we should always be worried but some correction in the conditions that led to the last 2 years should be warranted in my view. Being worried about over-tightening at this point is like worrying about the accelerator on a car going down hill with no brakes. I'm a fiscal moderate clearly and boom and bust cycles drive me crazy.

What concerns me the most is the fact that we always get burned by these cycles. We must not have the proper indices or the appropriate critical alerts when the existing indices hit certain levels. Why can't we steer the economy somewhere in the middle? Why does it always have to be at the point where we grow as much as we can get away with? To over use the car metaphor, why is it best to drive as close to the speed limit as the law will let you get away with? We know that at those speeds accidents are more likely to be fatal.

The nature of the beast is that policy always lags behind innovation and as innovation and the economy grow the policy making bodies have to grow in kind and it seems to me that this didn't happen.

I'm actually fascinated by behavioral economics and I don't think you can accurately discuss the economy without discussing human behavior at the same time. But I have to get back to work.