I'm not going to defend the Fed, but I disagree that they run the business cycle to give the illusion of recovery. The economy has to walk a narrow path between

I'm not going to defend the Fed, but I disagree that they run the business cycle to give the illusion of recovery. The economy has to walk a narrow path between inflation and deflation, and it does mean cooling things down when they get to hot and warming them up when they get to cool. The honest criticism is that they've been historically pretty bad at it. It often looks a lot like trying to smooth out the waves in the ocean with a flat iron.