If you want further reason to be depressed about our economic future, this article Janet Yellen and the Phillips Curve will supply it. If you believe this thing called the Phillips Curve relationship works, then you believe that higher inflation can bring faster growth and lower unemployment along with it. It is exactly this that Janet Yellen apparently believes. This is a direct quote:

“Each percentage point reduction in inflation costs on the order of 4.4 percent of gross domestic product, which is about $300 billion, and entails about 2.2 percentage-point-years of unemployment in excess of the natural rate.”

That is, reducing inflation slows growth and raises unemployment. If you want growth, inflation is therefore the way to go.

Yellen believes that the central bank should maintain enough inflation to prop up business activity, because ‘uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.’ This approach extends the Fed’s mission beyond even the dual mandate of Humphrey-Hawkins and into the sphere of American corporate activity, a place that the business economist Greenspan was reluctant to go. Yellen, a disciple of predictive modeling, dismisses the notion that the Fed could go too far. To her the record shows that ‘tuning works even if it is not “fine.”‘

Here’s the article’s conclusion:

It isn’t just the 1970s, but the last few years, that show how money creation does not produce permanent employment gains. This was raised time and time again at Yellen’s recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, when several Democrats bemoaned the absence of any ‘trickle down’ effect from quantitative easing. Do we want the Fed to double-down on that folly with Janet Yellen at the helm?

This is not going to end well.