Ryan Avent:
Monetary policy: QE sera, sera: In the bitterest of ironies, Mr Bernanke is giving America a Japanese recovery. He is doing so, seemingly, because pushing inflation temporarily above an arbitrary target is an unthinkable prospect, even though doing so would almost certainly, by his own convincing argument, have a huge impact on America's enormously costly unemployment problem. I suspect that the Ben Bernanke of 1999 would characterise this as a moral and intellectual failure of staggering proportions. Maybe the Ben Bernanke of 2012 has a convincing rebuttal; if so, he certainly hasn't shared it with us. Maybe one day we'll all be lucky enough to hear it. It had better be one hell of a good excuse.
And now it is time to ask the readership:
