Mark Thoma writes:

Economist's View: Will the Bernanke Fed Retain Its Inflation Fighting Credentials? : I have heard and read worries that the Fed under Ben Bernanke will not be as committed to fighting inflation as the Fed under Greenspan, a worry I do not share...

Mark is right: there is no reason, no reason at all to believe that Ben Bernanke will be less concerned with maintaining effective price stability than Don Kohn or Roger Ferguson or Glenn Hubbard or Martin Feldstein would have been--or than Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker were.

But there is a problem: when Fred Barnes is making a mess on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal by claiming that the reason that Cheney and Card backed Bernanke is that he would be complaisant and not raise interest rates in response to a deficit-caused inflationary gap... The only thing to say is that either Barnes does not know what he is talking about, or Cheney and Card do not know what they are talking about.