Is the landing soft? Will it stay that way?

WAY back in 1973, America was experiencing a troubling rise in inflation. But George Shultz, the Treasury secretary at the time, suggested that the problem would be transitory – that the economy could have a “soft landing”.

It didn’t. The 1970s were infamously a decade of stagflation, and inflation was finally brought under control in the 1980s only via tight money policies that caused years of very high unemployment.

So President Joe Biden was tempting fate a bit when he declared in the State of the Union address that “the landing is and will be soft”. But he’s almost surely right.