When the Fed does make mistakes, it rarely admits them and only after a suitably sanitizing interlude, as with Bernanke’s public dismay at the bank’s response to the Great Depression, seven decades after the fact. While the Fed might be entitled to the benefit of the doubt, it should never get the sort of uncritical deference that prevailed from the 1980s to the 2000s, when it was viewed as some sort of economic magician.
