Reuters had me back today in advance of the sixth Federal Reserve meeting of 2013, the meeting that is meant to signal the beginning of the end of quantitative easing and the eventual return to normal Fed operations.

It's too soon.

Worse, though Ben Bernanke has done a very good job and has tried his best, he hasn't done near what the economy required.  Jim Reid at Deutsche Bank argues that the Fed should have followed a far more audacious path by targeting GDP growth rather than inflation.  I'm convinced.

In a better world, the Fed would have had partners in the government that would not have pushed austerity at the worst possible time.  But, people will say, the federal government spent more.  Yes, it did.  But it also cut aid to states and cities so that local governments shed public sector jobs (and shredded pension promises) at exactly the wrong time.

It's been five years since Lehman Brothers and five and a half since Bear Stearns.  I am still reading about active foreclosure fraud.  The economic world that we have today is somewhat healed but fundamentally unchanged.  One of the scariest aspects is that when we went into the crisis, the emerging economies were in great shape, running cash surpluses.  Since then, many emerging governments and private concerns have borrowed money in cheap dollars, to be paid back in local currency.  This kind of imbalance can lead to shocks, particularly if the Fed starts to tighten and money flows out of emerging economies and back to the west. Their currencies will fall but the debts will remain.  We saw this in Asia in the 1990s.

Scary times out there, even if they are somewhat better than the worst years.