In his memoir Obama writes that by Spring 2008 "the United States had entered a full-blown recession. The housing bubble and easy money had disguised a whole host of structural weaknesses in the American economy for a full decade." Clinging to his most important wrong belief.

There's no reason to think monetary policy was too loose from 2001-08. If anything it was probably a bit too tight. That's why the recovery was anemic. Regardless, most of the post-2008 problems were created by the Fed's failure to ease sufficiently in 2008.

Lots of people (including me!) misunderstood this in 2008 but it's more obvious in hindsight now that we've had more than a decade of slow growth and low inflation.