The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.

The financial crisis appears to be mostly behind us, and the economy seems to have stabilized and is expanding again.

The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.

If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.

Inflation is certainly low and stable and, measured in unemployment and labour-market slack, the economy has made a lot of progress. The pace of growth is disappointingly slow, mostly because productivity growth has been very slow, which is not really something amenable to monetary policy. It comes from changes in technology, changes in worker skills and a variety of other things, but not monetary policy, in particular.

I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.

Nobody really understands gold prices and I don't pretend to understand them either.