Paul Krugma: The Intimidated Fed [View All]

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Last month more than 14 million Americans were unemployed by the official definition — that is, seeking work but unable to find it. Millions more were stuck in part-time work because they couldn’t find full-time jobs. And we’re not talking about temporary hardship. Long-term unemployment, once rare in this country, has become all too normal: More than four million Americans have been out of work for a year or more.

Given this dismal picture, you might have expected unemployment, and what to do about it, to have been a major focus of Wednesday’s press conference with Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. And it should have been. But it wasn’t.

After the conference, Reuters put together a “word cloud” of Mr. Bernanke’s remarks, a visual representation of the frequency with which he used various words. The cloud is dominated by the word “inflation.” “Unemployment,” in much smaller type, is tucked in the background.

This misplaced emphasis wasn’t entirely Mr. Bernanke’s fault, since he was responding to questions — and those questions focused much more on inflation than on unemployment. But that focus was, in itself, a symptom of the extent to which Washington has lost interest in the plight of the unemployed. And the Bernanke Fed, which should be taking a firm stand against these skewed priorities, is instead letting itself be bullied into following the herd.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion