Investors love a simple narrative, and economists are delighted to oblige. There’s just one slight problem: The obvious stories about the U.S. economy have been repeatedly wrong since the Covid pandemic.

Three basic assumptions underpin the simple narratives: Government spending matters, monetary policy matters and there is a natural link between growth, unemployment and inflation. None of the three proved reliable in the past four years, yet each seems self-evidently true, baked into the very structure of the economy. It is, in a word, confusing.

Each of the three assumptions has dominated the discourse at times.

Government spending was the first to sound alarm bells about inflation. In 2021, Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Treasury secretary, and Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, warned that President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package was far too big given the lack of spare capacity in the economy.

Sure enough, inflation soared, and they appeared right. Spending big when the economy is already running hot will create inflation. Simple.

Yet, the government kept on spending into a hot economy. Over the past two years—well after the pandemic stimulus—the federal deficit has been larger as a share of the economy than any time since World War II, aside from the deep recession after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 and the pandemic itself. The economy also kept growing relentlessly, expanding faster than the Federal Reserve’s estimate of the long-run sustainable level in all but one quarter. So inflation should have kept rising, right? Well, no.

Blanchard says the stimulus ended up having less impact than he anticipated because much of it was saved, smoothing out the effect over time.

However, the inflation spike is just as easily explained by extended supply-chain difficulties—what Fed Chair Jerome Powell initially called “transitory” problems, before they went on so long as to make the word seem a mistake. Once they were resolved, inflation eased.

Monetary policy hasn’t been particularly useful for forecasting, either. As one Fed policymaker put it, if you had asked any reputable economist what would happen to the economy if you jacked up rates from zero to above 5% in a little over a year, they would have predicted a deep recession. Instead, everything was hunky-dory.

The Fed thought it would bring down inflation by reducing demand, but since the Fed started raising rates consumer demand—measured by after-inflation consumer spending—has been expanding as fast as it was before the pandemic and seems to be accelerating. If higher rates were affecting demand, it ought at least to be growing more slowly.

The remaining followers of Milton Friedman’s monetarism had a brief moment of success as they predicted that rampant money-printing by the Fed would generate inflation. The super-simple model of looking at the broadest U.S. measure of money, or M2, showed a sharp rise in cash in bank accounts, which monetarists said was a surefire sign of inflation to come.

But while the model appeared to work—the inflation that followed was extremely high—it then predicted deep trouble ahead, perhaps even deflation and surely a recession, as M2 shrank year-over-year for the first time in modern history. So far, that has been wrong.

The jobs market has been messy, too. Some version of the so-called Phillips curve that shows a trade-off between unemployment and inflation is built into most macroeconomic models, but it hasn’t really worked. Since the pandemic, there has been no relationship between unemployment and wages or unemployment and inflation. Blanchard and former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke developed a new model taking into account how many unemployed workers are available for each job being advertised—but they thought the jobs market would have to weaken more than it has to bring inflation down so far.

By this point economists will be raising their hands and saying hang on, things are complicated. Yes! The problem is that we only get the complexity with hindsight, and investors tend to focus on one thing at a time. We now know, for example, that productivity seems to have grown fast, and that mass immigration boosted the labor force, messing with the Bernanke-Blanchard equation and helping reduce wage pressure and expand output.

Investors who still have a touching faith in economic forecasts should consider the consensus one, two and three years ago.

In October 2021, the U.S. was expected to expand by 4% in 2022, according to the regular survey by Consensus Economics.

By October 2022, that growth for the year had dropped to 1.7%, and economists were sure that recession was imminent. The Fed’s “dot plot” median was even more depressing, projecting 2022 growth of just 0.2%. Private-sector economists forecast growth of 0.2% for 2023.

The latest data show gross domestic product actually grew 2.5% in 2022, and by October 2023 economists were back up to predicting 2023 growth of 2.2% (though even that was too low), but they penciled in only 0.9% for this year. Now? They are back up to 2.6% for this year, but only at 1.7% for next year.

The recent record suggests that if economists are right this time, it will be more luck than judgment. The economy has repeatedly refused to do what basic models suggest it should, and no one knows if the excuses—saved stimulus checks, snarled supply chains, productivity, immigration—were one-offs or if there will be a new reason next year to explain why they were wrong.

Simple narratives can be very useful when examining how markets behave, but don’t expect them to explain the economy.