The experience of the past couple of years argues against sudden sharp cuts, and especially against tightening more when the economy turns out weaker than expected.
Furthermore, the liabilities of unfunded public-sector pension schemes have ballooned in the past few years, such that they now exceed public debt.Power shiftsAll this means that Mr Brown should be tightening more markedly.
This would have meant abandoning the attempt to help him toward some degree of autonomous movement and focusing simply on preventing bedsores and keeping the muscles in his inert limbs from tightening more than they already had.
"It's really quite striking how well the U.S. is performing relative to the U.K., which is tightening aggressively," says Ian Shepherdson, a Britain-based economist for the research firm High Frequency Economics, "and relative to Germany, which is tightening more modestly".
There are more passages of ferocious tightening, more sequences where the orchestra seems to be at war with itself, even another oboe bird (in the introduction to the finale).
We'll see more regulatory tightening, more fines, more bans, and, I predict, at least one case of serious criminal fraud by a major player in the cryptocurrency world.
