Will the Fed Kill the Recovery Again?

For most of its history, the Federal Reserve has been dominated by bankers and orthodox economists, who kill the recovery at the first sign of inflationary risks. Happily, the Fed today is led by Janet Yellen, a very uncharacteristic Fed chair who spent most of her career as a labor economist, of all things. Yellen is aware of the changes in the structure of labor markets and is unlikely to jump the gun on raising rates, though it’s always possible that she could be outvoted. The risk today is not that an improving jobs picture will set off inflation. It’s that even tight labor markets, by themselves, will not generate enough pressure for wage increases, because workers have lost so much bargaining power.