It was a busy weekend in retrospect, starting with Janet Yellen and other central bankers uncomfortably facing a global media that has become (for once) increasingly unconvinced. Reporters, really, don’t have much choice. The Federal Reserve Chairman might not be aware of just how much she has used the “transitory” qualifier since 2015, but others can’t be helped from noticing.

At the Group of Thirty’s International Banking Seminar in Washington on Sunday, Yellen tried to play it confidently:

My best guess is that these soft readings will not persist, and with the ongoing strengthening of labor markets, I expect inflation to move higher next year.

But she was also forced to admit to reality, or whatever counts for it in FOMC determinations, telling the assembled audience that she “recognize[s] that this year’s low inflation could reflect something more persistent than is reflected in our baseline projections.” That’s the message being sent by what is being called a “vocal minority” on the policymaking body.

The FOMC has never been as unified as is often presented, but this is different. This other faction is challenging root monetary assumptions – and for the same reasons reporters are increasingly jaded about “transitory.” Enough time has passed for central bankers to get something right.

Until this point, however, their views had been largely and controversially unchallenged. Ben Bernanke’s tenure, for instance, was from a media perspective laughably comfortable. He was given the benefit of the doubt even though the entirety of both of his terms had contained every reason for doubt (starting before “subprime is contained” and what that really meant monetarily).

This very modest skepticism, while healthy, arrives far too late. For far too long the global population, especially the working population, has been told uniformly that there is nothing wrong with the economy. What might have been unsatisfactory at any given moment was immediately dismissed as an unworthy claim, or if valid enough to engender some mainstream response then written off as something that was in the process of being fixed (the economy that “should be”) often by the genius monetary “stimulus” of whatever local central bank.