But if the bubble has now burst, interest rates no longer need to rise to prick it.
His task as a science-fiction writer was to imagine problems, to prick thumbs.
Raising official interest rates sufficiently to prick what may or may not be one could itself trigger a deep recession.
By raising interest rates to prick the bubble of inflation, the Fed induces a mild recession that is particularly hard on smaller companies.
The bubble will eventually burst anyway, but it would have been better to prick it sooner at the cost of a mild recession than to risk a deeper recession later.
Partly, perhaps, because of the third popular criticism of our bubble thesis: that it is too risky, both economically and politically, for a central bank to prick a bubble by raising interest rates.
While the previous Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, took rates to 6.5% to pierce the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, Bernanke seems to be betting that about 5.5% will be sufficient to prick the housing bubble.
He is a waspish critic of American policy towards the Muslim world under George Bush, but manages to prick Western misconceptions without falling into Mr Crooke's error of taking extremist movements entirely at their own estimation.
Indeed, it is possible to find entirely respectable economists (Robert Shiller for example) arguing that it was the lack of options and futures markets in housing that failed to prick the US housing bubble before it blew.
In January Mr Greenspan declared himself fully vindicated in his decision not to prick the stockmarket bubble in the late 1990s, but instead to wait for it to burst and then cut rates sharply to cushion the consequences.
The Federal Reserve's Alan Greenspan has declared himself fully vindicated in his decision not to prick the stockmarket bubble in the late 1990s, but instead to wait for it to burst and then cut rates sharply to cushion the economic consequences.
ECONOMIST: Yesterday's financial architecture needs refurbishing
With housing showing unmistakable signs of cooling in recent weeks, it seems Fed Chief Ben Bernanke is right to think that the rise in interest rates to 5.25% has been sufficient to prick the bubble (his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, went to 6.5% in 2000 to prick the dot-com bubble).
They used skin prick tests to identify those with allergic reactions, and questionnaires to identify those who developed asthma or eczema.
At age four, they were also given a skin-prick test to see if they had any of the most common allergies, including dust mite, animal fur, pollen, milk, eggs or peanuts.
BBC: Doctors could predict which children are at risk of asthma
"What a disingenuous little prick, " Greenberg said to himself, as he told someone later.
After removing the obvious fat, prick the goose all over the skin, taking care not to pierce the meat.
Prick the dough all over with the tines of a fork and transfer it to the baking sheet.
BIS, and Philip Lowe, at the Reserve Bank of Australia, have tried to shift the emphasis of this debate away from the question of whether central banks should prick a bubble.
ECONOMIST: Yesterday's financial architecture needs refurbishing
Or should Hamas hope that Palestinian suffering would prick the world's conscience, rally a billion-plus fellow Muslims to their side, and so eventually force Israel to back down and, perhaps better yet, inspire Palestinians in the West Bank to overthrow Fatah?
Basically, Armstrong seems to be telling us that not only did he dope but he also didn't let it prick his conscience.
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