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We are now in our seventh year at the zero lower bound. Over that period we’ve seen massive deficits rise and fall, aggressive monetary expansion and ill-advised monetary tightening, extreme fiscal austerity, and more. At this point we should therefore have a pretty good idea of how things work in this environment. And as I’ve often pointed out, everything has been more or less exactly what you would have expected from IS-LM (with the central bank controlling the monetary base, but not the endogenous money supply).

It’s remarkable, then, how much commentary in the media involves assertions that are completely at odds with everything we’ve seen since the financial crisis. I made fun of belief in invisible bond vigilantes and the confidence fairy in mid-2010, and sure enough, there have been no sightings of either in all the years since. Yet you’d never know that from the media commentary.

Simon Wren-Lewis offers a depressing example: he finds Robert Peston of the BBC continuing to talk about interest rates by invoking the invisible bond vigilantes – when as Wren-Lewis notes, France now pays much lower interest rates on its debt than the UK, and as he doesn’t note, so does Japan, with its very large debt and aging population. Worse still, however, Peston describes his fantasies – OK, I guess you could call them “speculations”, but anyway there is no evidence that they are driven by anything outside his own imagination – as the message being conveyed by “Mr. Market.” Through telepathy?

But belief in the invisible bond vigilantes and the confidence fairy isn’t the only faith that seems oddly impervious to evidence. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in an otherwise coherent description of Europe’s deflation risk, approvingly quotes Tim Congdon blithely declaring that monetary reflation in a liquidity trap is no problem:

The interest rate is totally irrelevant. What matters is the quantity of money. Large scale money creation is a very powerful weapon and can always create inflation.

Sure. Just look, in the accompanying chart, at the rate of M1 growth in the US versus the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation. Feel the power! Seriously, how can an alleged expert be talking straight monetarism at this point in history?

You have to wonder, where does conventional wisdom about how the economy works come from? Not from economic models, which actually don’t lead to the popular stories about bond vigilantes and confidence fairies, or say that the money supply is decisive when you’re at the zero lower bound. Not from experience, which has been utterly at odds with “mediamacro” for years. Apparently it comes from the gut – or maybe from some other anatomical feature in the same general vicinity. And then these gut feelings are reported as facts.