A correspondent points me to the news from Sweden, which has stopped flirting with deflation and moved right in. Here’s inflation excluding food, energy, tobacco, and alcohol:

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It’s amazing: Sweden, which at first weathered the crisis fairly well, and faced none of the institutional constraints of the euro area, has managed — completely gratuitously — to get itself into a deflationary trap.

The Riksbank says, in effect, that nobody could have predicted this development. But of course its own former deputy governor — and my former colleague — Lars Svensson, more or less frantically warned that the Riksbank was making a terrible mistake by tightening money despite low inflation and lots of economic slack. His reward was increasing isolation, and eventually departure. You see, all the VSSPs — very serious Swedish people — knew that it was important to raise interest rates because, well, because.

And getting out of the trap is going to be very hard.

I’d like to imagine that people will admit that Lars was right all along, and that in general the urge to purge has been highly destructive. But my guess is that he’ll still be considered unsound — he was prematurely anti-deflationist — and that tight-money advocates will continue to be regarded as reliable, prudent people even as they lead us into long-run stagnation.