A few days ago, Alan Greenspan ... spoke out in defense of his successor.Attacks on Ben Bernanke by Republicans, he told The Financial Times, are “wholly inappropriate and destructive.” He's right...
But why are the attacks on Mr. Bernanke so destructive? ... The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas... Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we'd be better off if the Fed paid ...more attention to unemployment. ...
OK,... let me take this in stages. First, about inflation obsession: For at least three years, right-wing economists, pundits and politicians have been warning that runaway inflation is just around the corner, and they keep being wrong. ... At this point, inflation is ... a bit below the Fed's self-declared target of 2 percent.
Now, the Fed has, by law, a dual mandate: It's supposed to be concerned with full employment as well as price stability. And while we more or less have price stability by the Fed's definition, we're nowhere near full employment. So this says that the Fed is doing too little, not too much....
To be sure, more aggressive Fed policies to fight unemployment might lead to inflation above that 2 percent target. But remember that dual mandate: If the Fed refuses to take even the slightest risk on the inflation front, despite a disastrous performance on the employment front, it's violating its own charter. And, beyond that,... a rise in inflation to 3 percent or even 4 percent ... would almost surely help the economy. ...
Which brings me back to those Republican attacks and their chilling effect on policy.
True, Mr. Bernanke likes to insist that he and his colleagues aren't affected by politics. But that claim is hard to square with the Fed's actions, or rather lack of action. As many observers have noted, the Fed's own forecasts indicate that ... it still expects low inflation and high unemployment for years to come. Given that prospect, more of the “quantitative easing” ... should be a no-brainer. Yet the recently released minutes from a March 13 meeting show a Fed inclined to do nothing unless things take a turn for the worse.
So what's going on? I think that Fed officials, whether they admit it to themselves or not, are feeling intimidated — and that American workers are paying the price for their timidity.
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