The deeper question is whether there has been a profound and fundamental alteration in the way our economy works that creates discontinuity from the past and promises a significantly higher path of growth than we have experienced in recent decades. The question has arisen because the economic performance of the United States in the past five years has in certain respects been unprecedented.
Contrary to conventional wisdom and the detailed historic economic modelling on which it is based, it is most unusual for inflation to be falling this far into a business expansion. Many of the imbalances observed during the few times in the past that a business expansion has lasted more than seven years are largely absent today.