Mark Thoma:
To reduce the chance of this happening, policymakers should have already put policies in place to provide additional stimulus as insurance against this outcome. But they will wait until another dip actually happens before even beginning to deliberate seriously, and by then it will be too late for policy to do much to offset the dip in the economy. Thus, even though it will be too late to get insurance once the economy is already evidently sick -- insurance that is a bargain due to low interest rates -- we have decided to go forward uninsured, and hope for the best.