“The Economy Is Back,” trumpets the upper left corner of the cover of Time magazine. “The Economy Stinks,” moans the lower right corner. More professionally, Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke tells Congress that most of the participants on the Fed’s monetary policy committee view “uncertainty about the outlook for growth and unemployment as greater than normal.” Titans of industry are also confused. They can’t decide whether to give more weight to the good news than the bad, and so they are sitting on $2 trillion in cash that, because of low interest rates, is earning almost nothing. They can’t even seem to find acquisitions that are both strategically sensible and well-priced.

Then there are the expert policymakers. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) are suggesting you lose sleep worrying about the inflation that they think will inevitably result from a long period of low interest rates and excessive money creation. But the International Monetary Fund wants central banks to keep interest rates low to offset the fiscal tightening it is prescribing for most countries. And just in case you have sorted that out, along come some experts, several of them high Fed officials, warning that we are fighting the wrong war when we worry about inflation. It is deflation that is looming, witness hints that price levels are declining. This, they say, is what really should keep you awake at night, since once it takes hold, deflation is terribly difficult to root out of the system, as Japan painfully learned.