One thing everyone seems to agree on is that Barack Obama has won the US election at a really bad time to be president. Many people said during the campaign that the economic problems were so bad that whoever won was almost certainly doomed to be a one-term president, swept out of office in 2012.

Maybe. But it does not have to be like that. The president-elect has one thing going for him. The crisis he inherits is one of recession and deflation. The difference between a crisis of deflation and a crisis of inflation is this: governments that need to reduce inflation have to do nasty things; governments that want to end deflation have to do nice things. It is the difference between buying at the top of the market and buying at the bottom.