November 13, 2009 6:53 pm November 13, 2009 6:53 pm OK, maybe a more polite way to say it is this: bad ideas are acting as serious constraints on policy. We’re in a liquidity trap, with interest rates up against the zero bound. This means that conventional monetary policy isn’t sufficient. What should we do? The first-best answer — that is, the answer that economic models, like my old Japan’s trap