By Fareed Zakaria, CNN (plus Facebook & Twitter)

In the video above you’ll see a “word cloud” - a visual depiction of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's historic press conference last week. The cloud shows all the words he used often. The size of the words reflects how much he used them. It's a picture that tells a story.

Ben Bernanke has one word on his mind: Inflation.

Bernanke uttered this word 31 times in his main statement, and then many more times during the Q&A that followed.

There's a reason that we should all be looking at Bernanke's words carefully. He is trying to navigate between two somewhat contradictory missions - to keep inflation low and to keep employment high.

Now for a quick reminder: the Fed Chairman is like the driver of the national economic automobile. If the Fed keeps interest rates low, that's like stepping on the accelerator of the economy because people can get cheap loans, which is good for employment.

But if the car goes too fast and there's too much borrowing and spending then that will tend to drive up prices and wages causing inflation, which no one wants.

By raising interest rates Bernanke would be putting on the brakes. Higher rates mean fewer people take out loans. That slows down economic activity, resulting in less danger of inflation but also in less employment for Americans.

Throughout the financial crisis and until recently, unemployment has been Bernanke’s central concern. He understood that the global economy was in a big slowdown and that the West was in a massive recession.

He put his foot on the accelerator. But he now seems to have gotten worried about inflation. This might mean that the foot is coming off the accelerator and onto the brakes.

It's a tough call, but I think this move would be premature. TheU.S.economy is having its slowest recovery from a recession in five decades. The only reason unemployment numbers are even falling right now is that many people have stopped looking for work (the way unemployment is calculated, you have to be looking for work and not finding it to be counted as unemployed).

I understand the fears of inflation, but does it look like there is any danger that the American economy is overheating right now? Housing prices are falling; consumers are burdened with debt; there are millions of unemployed or underemployed people.

And, remember, theU.S.economy doesn't exist in a vacuum. We are part of a global economy. There are tens of millions of workers in China and India and they're producing goods and services for a fraction of the costs of Western workers.

So, what happens? It is tough for Western workers to get wage hikes with all this global competition. And wage hikes - wage inflation - is the main driver of overall inflation in America. Unless you're a banker or a sports star, your wages have not been going up these days.

Nevertheless, Ben Bernanke's speech was historic. No other Fed Chairman in history has given a press conference, period. One of the things Bernanke promised when he was named Fed Chairman was transparency. He's made the Fed more open. In doing so, he's done what very few public officials willingly do - diluted his own power.

He's ahead of the curve on transparency and accountability. However, I'm not so sure he's ahead of the curve on the economy.

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