The bottom line

Bernanke has given serious thought to the Krugman-Rogoff argument. One obstacle is practical. Fed policy works, in part, by getting the market to do the Fed’s work (if the Fed is buying bonds, traders who want to be on the same side of the markets as the central bank will buy bonds too). But any policy adopted by less than a 7-to-3 majority by the Fed’s Open Market Committee would not be viewed by markets as a credible policy, likely to endure, and Bernanke is not guaranteed to get this margin today. “No central banker would do it,” Mankiw says of raising the inflation target; the political reaction would be too severe. (When Mankiw, a Harvard economist, wrote a column raising the possibility of a higher inflation target, Drew Faust, the university’s president, received letters urging her to fire him.)

That is from Roger Lowenstein’s profile of Ben Bernanke, interesting and excellent throughout.

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