The Federal Reserve's December meeting showed the central bank taking a heavily different approach to interest rates. Not the choice to hold the benchmark federal funds rate steady, but the suggestion that the Fed could cut rates three times next year.

The result was an orgy of market activity, with stocks on a roll and investors probably singing "We're in the Money" to themselves. But some economists are wondering whether the Fed is setting itself, and the economy, up to fail.

Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers said so in an interview with the Financial Times. "I think it's premature to judge that we have landed softly, because I think that if you look at underlying inflation rates, depending upon your measures, some of them are still running well above 2 per cent," he said. "If inflation is currently at 2 per cent, it's not clear that it won't go back up again. And it isn't clear that the landing has been soft in the sense that there are a variety of problems — declining flows of credit, inverted yield curves, aspects of consumer behavior, rising evidence of credit strains — that raise the possibility that the landing won't be soft, if there is one. So at this point, we may soft land on the aircraft carrier, but the landing may be hard, and we may overfly."