By John Tamny
About former Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns, Rice University historian Allen Matusow once wrote that “he had no fixed monetary principle of his own, except a determined eclecticism that translated into unsteadiness of purpose.” It would be fair to describe our present Fed Chairman in the same way.
Indeed, in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Ben Bernanke set out to explain the central bank’s plan for managing economic growth and inflation in a way that could only be described as a hybrid of Phillips Curve and monetarist thinking. But to be fair, they’re not dissimilar.
