Governments and central banks took largely unprecedented fiscal and monetary policy measures to prevent the global recession from turning into a protracted depression. Some analysts said this was an over reaction. Others criticized the tyranny of the short term compromising medium term sustainability.
But received wisdom and mainstream view have been that it was clearly safer to err on doing too much rather than doing too little. Thus the policy response should be seen as an insurance against this risk. But there is no real way of judging whether we are overinsuring or underinsuring.