Krugman berates Bernanke

This weekend's upcoming Times Magazine includes an excerpt of Paul Krugman's forthcoming book, End This Depression Now, in which he criticizes the Fed's recent monetary policy as too timid, and in particular too timid relative to the implications of Ben Bernanke's research prior to joining the Fed.

This week I showed the Q&A's from Bernanke's March 2012 lectures at GWU in my intermediate macro class at Queens College.  What stands out now that Krugman's raised this point, that Bernanke appears to have significantly moderated his views on Fed activism, is a mildly reverential invocation of Paul Volcker's and Alan Greenspan's commitments to price stability in the 1980s and 1990s, which appears toward the end of lecture 2. It reminds me of Paul Volcker's hawkish op-ed last fall, which I mentioned here.