 So, I think we had maybe 20 years when monetary policy was reasonably effective at turning the economy around and keeping demand growing, but only by pushing the unsustainability of household finances further and further and further. And it seems to me we've ended that, and part of that is there isn't as much room to cut interest rates, but also that we've seen that household debt bubble burst. I'm Steve Fazzari. I teach economics, and I'm also part of the sociology department at Washington University in St. Louis in the middle of the country. So this idea of secular stagnation is something that I've taken on to help understand the work that I've been doing over the past 30 years. So stagnation would mean slow growth broadly. The idea of secular stagnation is slow growth that persists over a longer period of time. So in the U.S. economy in particular, we've seen an economy that just hasn't recovered the way that most conventional forecast would have predicted after the Great Recession. We haven't recovered the trend that we had prior to 2005, 2006, and it's been disappointing. And as a result, we've seen people effectively dumb down their forecasts of the economy. It's just been growing slowly, and it's lasted for now eight years at least, if not longer. So this kind of thinking I think is very important. I'm remembering a bumper sticker I saw sometime before, which says, before we can fix things, we have to understand them. If we keep thinking in a more mainstream sense that stagnation beyond the short run has to be from the supply side, then we get the typical story either that, well, we have to somehow encourage more labor force participation by cutting taxes or things along those lines, and I think this is the more realistic thing from the supply side. There isn't much we can do. I think the more realistic people who take this perspective realize that standard kind of supply side policies are really pretty small beer in terms of the ability to stimulate that part, that side of the economy. So it's kind of a sense of, well, this is just the new normal. This is the best we can do. From my point of view, once you recognize that this phenomenon that's become known as secular stagnation is to a large extent the result of shortage on the demand side, we can do more. Derek Taylor, the chair of INET, you said the one thing we can always do in principle is create nominal demand, and I actually agree with that. So it opens the door for the possibility that various kinds of policy responses could be helpful in this regard in terms of a fiscal stimulus, a middle class tax cut. Maybe more difficult, but ultimately more important in the longer term, would be to restore a sense of shared prosperity, to see wage growth across the income distribution as we saw in the post-world toward two decades, which I would have kind of reversed this recycling problem of rising inequality, but it's hard to know exactly how that's going to happen. It's a bit frustrating that this demand beyond the short run kind of perspective, this idea that we could have medium to longer term periods of time when demand growth is insufficient to have our economy operating as strong as it could be, really is still as pretty much on the fringe of the mainstream. It's changing to some extent. I've been talking about these things for really basically most of my career, even my PhD dissertation in some sense, is related to this issue broadly, and research I did in the 1980s about the inability of wage and price flexibility to bring back the economy to the supply side was already moving in this direction. And in my teaching over the years, I've been talking to students about the way that demand generation precedes is something that we must pay attention to. But it hasn't caught on the mainstream, and I guess the key question is, well, why is that? I think part of it is a misunderstanding of basic Keynesian economics. I've seen it as the result of market imperfections, rigidities, stickiness of wages and prices that in a way that's misled the mainstream into thinking that, well, it's a short run problem. Eventually, if there's unemployment, wages will fall. Eventually, if firms are selling less than is optimal for them, they'll cut prices, and that should solve our problem. But then, of course, we ran into the problem. Nobody really wants deflation. Well, that doesn't seem to be a very practical solution. So in the 1980s, the 1990s, you got this so-called new consensus in macroeconomics. Well, maybe wages and prices are not going to solve our problem, but there's a substitute. There's monetary policy. And if we use wise monetary policy, the Allen Greenspans and the Ben Bernankees and the Janet Yellen's of the world will be able to guide us to basically the same story where these demand problems are constrained. I've always been somewhat skeptical of this view, although I think it's a very historically specific kind of issue. When we had very high nominal interest rates in the 1980s, and there was a lot of room for the monetary policy to cut interest rates, to some extent I think that these policies were somewhat successful. So in the recession of the early 1980s, cutting interest rates was important to getting the economy back on track. There were big interest rate cuts in the early 90s. There were big interest rate cuts following the bursting of the tech bubble. And to some extent, it did bring the economy back. At the time, I was probably more skeptical than I should have been. But as I was looking back on these things, how did this actually work? Well, I think it largely worked not so much by textbook, inter-temporal substitution. We encouraged people to move some spending forward from what they would otherwise do in a very sustainable way. Rather, what it did was to encourage people to borrow, and in some sense, borrow like crazy, largely against their homes in the United States. And this ultimately turned out to be unsustainable. So I think we had maybe 20 years when monetary policy was reasonably effective at turning the economy around and keeping demand growing, but only by pushing the unsustainability of household finances further and further and further. And it seems to me we've ended that. And part of that is there isn't as much room to cut interest rates, but also that we've seen that household debt bubble burst. And so I'm not optimistic about monetary policy being all that helpful in the period going forward. Even as we move away from the so-called zero lower bound, I'm still concerned because I don't think we're going to see the same kind of stimulus to household borrowing that was critical to the function of monetary policy in the next five to 10 years.