If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

- Albert Einstein

-Look, I know that was a cheap shot. And I know that you're attempting to explain my misconception, not yours. But the fact remains: I explained a liquidity trap as "the country lacks cash flow" and you threw a graph and Janet Yellen at it. It doesn't change the fact that to the average man on the street, a liquidity trap is a lack of cash flow.

Most people don't know that the Fed isn't the government. Let's be real, though - they don't have to know that. In fact, it complicates things: try to explain how Bush's tax rebates weren't monetary policy without invoking The Beast from Jeckyll Island. Taxpayers got money as the result of a policy from the government. et voila. "Monetary policy."

And really, it's turtles all the way down with this shit. Economics is a profession where you're derisively labeled a "quant" if you understand differential equations, where Piketty bent over backwards to apologize for using algebra in a populist book. I worked for a company that worshipped EBITDA but of 8 VPs polled, 6 couldn't tell me what the fuck it was or why we used that metric instead of something, you know, defensible. Obfuscation is a fundamental tenet of economics, and the only reason it doesn't piss more people off is that economists are largely successful at it.

A liquidity trap is where the country doesn't have enough free cash flow for a gazillion different reasons that economists will attempt to explain using graphs full of acronyms, units you've never heard of and calendars that don't match the one on your desk. They do this so that you aren't tempted to ask them for an answer they can't give you.