In such a context, fiscal policy would be the only effective macroeconomic policy tool left, and would have to assume much more responsibility for countering recessionary pressures.
And it was actively supported by governments of all parties as a central macroeconomic policy tool to maintain economic and social stability.
We need to remind ourselves that our expectations of what one macroeconomic policy tool - in this case monetary policy - can achieve are simply too high.
Nevertheless, these flows raise difficult policy choices, from the degree to which countries should allow for currency appreciation, to the respective roles of macroeconomic policy, macro prudential tools, and capital controls.
He observes that gross domestic product has been devastated by "residences not built since 2007 because of the financial crisis, resulting depression, and breaking of housing finance," and "using the FHFA and the GSEs as tools of macroeconomic policy might well be superior" to other recovery tools.
These are the "three pillars," of Brazil's economic stability, but they cannot be divorced from a global macroeconomic context, nor from the policy tools at Brazil's disposal to maintain economic equilibrium.
"Fiscal policy, as a tool of macroeconomic policy, is dead," says Robert Litan, director of economic studies at the moderately liberal Brookings Institution.
The recent slowdown of credit, and the pain now being felt by some borrowers, may be the beginning of the correction.A final awkward legacy of the dash for the euro is that the Portuguese government, like all others in the euro area, now has only one tool of macroeconomic policy left: budgetary policy.
Or take macroeconomic policy.
