A consensus has formed that the Federal Reserve waited too long to start tightening money. Ben Bernanke, the former Fed chairman, has said so. Janet Yellen, another former chairman who now serves as Treasury secretary, has implicitly agreed, saying that she, like many other observers, underestimated how high inflation would run for how long.
But Fed watchers are still disagreeing about another question: Is the central bank tightening too much and too fast now?
Josh Bivens, the head of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, is worried. “If we have a recession because the Fed moves too fast and too high on interest rate hikes, that will be a clear mistake,” he recently told Huffington Post.
