Noah Smith

I'm sorry, quantitative easing.

Qualitative easing actually does exist, but it's another thing.

So quantitative easing, QE, you see the Fed printing money to buy longer-term bonds.

Usually when the Fed prints money, it just buys short-term bonds like T-bills or whatever.

But then it can also, it can and sometimes does print money to buy longer-term bonds to push down those longer-term interest rates.

And if it does that, if it does QE, we'll basically know that that's a really good sign that this is happening.

So austerity got a bad name years ago in the Great Recession when people were like, we need to spend to stop this, to get out of this recession.

They were probably right about that, assuming we could have done fiscal restraint and austerity during the boom that came after the Great Recession.

recession, we had a long boom and we could have fixed the government's finances during that long boom the way we did in the 90s.

Instead, we did not because interest rates were low.

And so we just rolled over the debt and we never fixed, we never removed the debt that we built up to fight the Great Recession.

Well, was there a huge mistake there?

Yes, we did.

The average maturity of U.S.

debt is something like 4.3 years.

That's way too short.

We should have locked in like 20-year debt at super low interest rates.

We would have given ourselves a lot more runway politically to solve this problem.

We did not.

If that was so obvious, what was the impediment there?