Matias Vernengo — Fed up with the full employment target?

The debate on Bernanke's views on inflation targeting -- whether it should be 2 or 4% -- as I noted in a previous post is peculiar, to say the least. After all the Fed has a dual mandate, and inflation preoccupations have to be tempered by the pressing question of unemployment. The preoccupation in some quarters is that the Fed already has already accepted as a matter of fact that it has single mandate (see here and here). It seems to me that critics (e.g. Krugman, DeLong and others) are correct for the wrong reasons.

Read it at Naked Keynesianism
Fed up with the full employment target?
by Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor, University of Utah

Favorite lines: <i>Full employment has not been a target, but keeping workers demands for higher wages checked has been very much part of the reaction function. Jamie Galbraith has written about it (go here for a technical paper). So the Fed has a single target mandate, but is not an inflation target, it is a "fear of full employment target"."</i>