inflation deficiency nonsense

For several years now, a small group of Keynesian academics and hacks have seized nearly absolute financial power. They’ve used the Fed’s printing presses to justify the lunacy of unending zero interest rates (ZIRP) and massive quantitative easing (QE) on the grounds that there is too little inflation. This whole consumer inflation-targeting scheme is an inherently preposterous notion. There is not one scrap of evidence that 2% consumer inflation is better for rising living standards and societal wealth gains than is 0.2%. And there is much history and economic logic that points in exactly the opposite direction....

[T]here isn’t an inflation deficiency problem, and there never has been. The whole 2% inflation mantra is just a smoke screen to justify the massive daily intrusion in financial markets by a power-obsessed bunch of monetary central planners. They made it up and then rode it to ever increasing dominance over the financial system.

-- David Stockman (The Daily Reckoning) Feb. 22, 2016