Right now, however, my biggest concern in this context is somewhat different: the past decade’s policies of anemic recovery are apparently not perceived as a failure by either those at the tiller at the time or by their successors. With a few honorable exceptions, Fed policymakers tend to say that they did the best they could, given the fiscal headwinds imposed on them. With a few honorable exceptions, Obama administration policymakers say that they stopped a second Great Depression, and that during the recovery they did their best given how they were hobbled by the Republican majorities in Congress.
For their part, conservative economists tend to either be silent on the subject or say that the policies — both fiscal and monetary — pursued by the Obama administration and by the Bernanke Fed were dangerously inflationary, and that we have been lucky to escape the fate of Greece — or Zimbabwe.
Economic analysis has made the rise and fall of economies easier to understand and easier to manage — or at least I thought it had. Yet once again, policymakers (including the decision makers at the top in the Obama administration) abandoned modern economics in favor of discredited policies born of a mixture of so-called common sense and 19th-century misunderstandings. We are all paying the price — well, the bottom 99 percent of us, anyway.
Source: Was the Great Recession More Damaging Than the Great Depression? – Milken Institute Review