Hear that, Janet Yellen? The economy is screaming for help.

Time for a paradigm shift at the Federal Reserve

Yellen
(Image credit: (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images))

For the first quarter of 2014, the economy was said to be shrinking by an annualized 1 percent, a pretty bad result. Now the revisions to that estimate are in, and they are much, much worse. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, real GDP shrank by 2.9 percent on an annual basis in the first quarter of this year, the worst such number since the first quarter of 2009, during the depths of the Great Recession.

My colleague John Aziz argues that this alone shouldn't convince the Federal Reserve to halt its tapering of unconventional monetary stimulus, but I disagree. This is a great opportunity to shock the Federal Reserve Board out of its cautious stance, and take some bold action to extricate itself and the economy from a sandpit of pitiful growth and zero interest rates.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.