Have Fiscal and Monetary Policies Failed?

Monetary and fiscal policies are commonly judged by how successful they are in attaining the national goals of full employment, stable equilibrium prices, high output growth rates, and balance-of-payments equilibrium. Inasmuch as we presently have none of these things, recent monetary and fiscal policies have received rather low marks from many economists, even after they have considered the claims that these policies, consisting of only a limited number of tools, cannot do everything, that what they can do takes time, and that they have not always been utilized perfectly, to say the least.