The last time I had occasion to notice Jack Lew was last January when he was in Davos assuring the world there was nothing wrong with either its economy or markets. He even went so far as to reiterate the “official” Treasury position about the dollar. He didn’t say it explicitly, but his meaning, much to do with the timing, was clear. The “strong dollar” was affirmation of all that was supposedly right at that moment of seemingly clear sailing apart from “transitory” oil prices.

The strong dollar, as all my predecessors have joined me in saying, is a good thing. It’s good for America. If it’s the result of a strong economy, it’s good for the U.S., it’s good for the world.

A little over a year later, there’s no more of that. Lacking consistency as usual, politician after all, Lew spoke at the G-20 meeting suggesting now that the economy once confirmed by the “strong dollar” still exists – and that it is “markets” that are now all wrong.

“Don’t expect a crisis response in a non-crisis environment,” Lew said in an interview broadcast Wednesday with David Westin of Bloomberg Television. “This is a moment where you’ve got real economies doing better than markets think in some cases.”

The dollar was a “market” in early 2015 which he suggested had it all right; now that is no longer believed widely, markets are now apparently wrong. The fact that he doesn’t explicitly state which one he is referring to is indicative of this kind of short-termism; undoubtedly he is suggesting the stock market as the bright flashing change this year to last (in other words, the dollar remains but it has been stocks that have gone over to the “dark side”). In that case, he would have done much better using actual market data from his own fiefdom – US treasuries.

The treasury curve has been sinking since November 20, 2013, so it wasn’t like there was some sudden suggestion in January 2015 that “markets” were not uniformly behind him. In fact, at that point only stocks seemed unbothered by the increasing and intensifying “market” turmoil all over the place; not just in the utterly bearish flattening UST curve or the conspicuous crash in oil prices, but eurodollars, foreign currencies and all the areas that actually matter economically-speaking. We should also include another “market” under Treasury, TIPS, and their own downright alarming inflation expectations. The “rising dollar” that began in late June 2014 was a warning, one that has so far been proven correct at the direct expense of all those like Secretary Lew emphatically suggesting the world discard all those observations in favor of nothing but his own (and Yellen’s).