The revival of Austrian trade cycle theory

Oh dear. Greg Ip is being ignorant again.
Over on brad delong there have been several postings,
some involving me, about Bernanke’s work. Bottom line:
Ip here is misreperesenting.

Ben Bernanke cut his teeth academically on publishing
about financial fragility in the early 1980s in the AER.
The sources on that were not Austrian, but (Post) Keynesian:
Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger, plus the old neoclassical,
Irving Fisher, althoug I pointed out there that this idea was
orthodox classical in the 19th century, the main theory then of
business cycles, with John Stuart Mill giving its clearest
expression, and such odd ducks as the brilliant Sismondi and
the “I made a fortune in the bubbles” Richard Cantillon in the
early 1700s probably being the original theorist.

So, not long after 9/11, while he was on the Fed Board, Bernanke
was concerned about the possibility of a Japanese style deflation
that could trigger financial instability, and convinced Greenspan
and others to go along, based on “complexity concerns,” as expressed
in Greenspan’s AEA address of a couple of years ago. At the height
of this, Bernanke cited Milton Friedman on “dropping money out of
helicopters,” metaphorically, which they did effectively, to offset
the threat of a potentially structurally destabilizing deflation.
When he went up for the Chairmanship, various commentators got on
Bernanke’s case as an “inflationist,” based on his “helicopter money”
remarks, with most of these commentators having no idea whatsoever
what they were talking about or what he was talking about.

Bottom line? No, Bernanke is not overly obsessed with excessive
inflation in general.