A couple days ago I wrote a post ribbing Nobel laureate Robert Lucas for his statement at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Economic Association that:
Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the body of knowledge and expertise that we hoped would prevent the recurrence of that economic disaster. My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.
Afterwards I sent him an e-mail asking if he had updated his views. His response:
Why don’t we wait until the recession/depression actually arrives? Of course, I was and am surprised at the extent of the liquidity crisis—and would have written my AEA address differently if I had foreseen it—but Bernanke is dealing with it in a forceful way and I think we still have a good chance of averting a major recession.