Bernanke and company have managed to keep things going.

It's all about how you define "things", in my opinion. People and cultures have a huge ability to adapt to new situations, then their short-term memory lapses allow them to believe that the new is pretty much the way everything always was.

If this weren't so, we wouldn't, as a species, have colonized every ecological niche on the planet over the last 100,000 years. People are much better at explaining the present than they are at predicting the future. That's one of the reasons that TOD, lovable and fascinating as it is, will always be ahead of the curve, and therefore, on the fringe.

And of course, advancing wild-ass guesses on this site has no real consequence. It is at best, greatly educational, and at worst, vastly entertaining, but in Ben Bernanke's world WAG's have real consequences. I believe he is leading us to a new reality (basically, concentration of wealth in fewer hands, and diminished expectations for most of us). And in due time, the likelihood is that everyone will come to accept the new reality as the enduring "normal" state of affairs.