Black Swans

Taleb on the Stimulus:

Our favorite living economist, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, thinks the stimulus made the economy worse. It's hard to argue with the reasoning. Unemployment is not only worse than it was in 2008, it's far worse than the projections made by the administration for what their stimulus would accomplish. (I suggest the excellent blog PoliticalMath for examining this question. There are many posts in his series.)

Nor did we de-leverage, which you will recall is Taleb's normal advice for people operating in the fourth quadrant. Instead, as a nation we vastly increased our debt.