Thus The Wall Street Journal today. “Gathering signs of a slowdown across many parts of the world are roiling markets and confounding policy makers, who after years of battling anemic growth have limited tools left to jump-start a recovery,” explains the newspaper. Recovery, what recovery? The few signs of it here and there hardly add up to anything worth boasting about. America is doing better than Europe, but only just. Ever since the onset of the global financial crisis, the world economy has been in the doldrums. And there is no end of it in sight. If there is any enigma about all this, it is that nobody has had the guts to call it by its proper name: depression. This would be the first step in jump-starting a recovery. The cure starts with the diagnosis. In this respect at least, economics is not unlike medicine. To stretch the analogy a bit, the diagnosis starts with a doctor worthy of that name. John Maynard Keynes comes to mind at once. Where is he when he is needed?