“This time is different.”

The cliché of clichés. The most eye roll-inducing phrase of all phrases that elicit eye rolls. The gold standard of the doomsaying gold bugs. The go-to aphorism for a bear that’s run fresh out of ideas.

Stripped of legitimacy through overuse and persistent misapplication, “this time is different” has become the one thing you don’t say in polite company if you’re at all interested in having any company at all. “This time is different” has become the special domain of the fringe blogs – a title they use for the token market posts they manage to cram in between “Yellowstone Supervolcano Threatens To Swallow Midwest” and “Hillary Clinton Caught Having Lunch With Transexual Martians At Area 51”.

And see that’s unfortunate, because as my buddy Kevin Muir wrote earlier this week, this time actually is different. Like, for real. In fact, “this time is different” by design. It’s not a secret. It’s the furthest thing from a conspiratorial comment that one could make. Central bank policy in the post-crisis world is unprecedented in nature – that is, it’s “different”. And here’s what “different” looks like:

Of course it follows from the same dynamic that’s part and parcel of an unanchored system. If what you want is the flexibility and the policy toolkit to deploy countercyclical measures during downturns, well then what you’re going to end up doing is having to effectively inflate larger bubbles each time in a kind of spiral dynamic where the next boom has to be large enough to subsume the last. The only way that can continue to work in perpetuity is if it operates against a backdrop of a disinflationary shock or some other structural disinflationary dynamic that keeps it from spinning out of control. So in a sense, “this time” is just “last time” on steroids, but that’s another story.