Mr. Bernanke, who is probably nearing the end of his tenure running the Fed, seemed to have had such criticisms in mind last week when he assessed “the first 100 years of the Federal Reserve” at a conference in Cambridge, Mass.

In analyzing the Fed’s failures during the Depression, he seemed to be taking clear aim at some of his current critics — and perhaps at other central banks that were far less aggressive after the credit crisis.

First, he appeared to address the idea, popular in some circles, that we need a new gold standard.

“The degree to which the gold standard actually constrained U.S. monetary policy during the early 1930s is debated,” he said, “but the gold standard philosophy clearly did not encourage the sort of highly expansionary policies that were needed.” He said policy makers, following flawed economic theories, concluded “on the basis of low nominal interest rates and low borrowings from the Fed that monetary policy was appropriately supportive and that further actions would be fruitless.”

Was that a criticism of the European Central Bank under Jean-Claude Trichet, which lowered interest rates but did little else as the euro zone crisis grew? It certainly helped to explain why Mr. Bernanke felt the need to embark on quantitative easing and to focus on longer-term interest rates as well as short-term ones.

Then Mr. Bernanke pointed to “another counterproductive doctrine: the so-called liquidationist view, that depressions perform a necessary cleansing function.” That was the view pushed in the early 1930s by Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary, to such an extent that it angered even President Herbert Hoover, who did not, however, seem to think he could overrule the secretary. Now the comments could be read as a reproach to those, in the United States and Europe, who push for austerity above all else.