I WAS on holiday last week during the June meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. So, one is tempted to quip, was the FOMC. It took action, of course. As my colleague discussed here and here, the Fed opted to continue "Operation Twist", a programme in which it sells short-term securities and buys long-term securities in an effort to flatten the yield curve without adding to the overall size of its balance sheet. Yet this is incredibly weak sauce; it is about the smallest step the Fed could take to avert outright policy tightening. At this point, the contradictions in the Fed's statements and the extent of its outright failure are painfully obvious. A few points:

First, the Fed is no longer content to simply aim for an inflation range that includes its 2% target as its higher limit (all while missing wildly on the employment side of the mandate). In new economic projections released with the June policy statement, the Fed projects an overall inflation rate of 1.2% to 1.7% in 2012 (with core inflation coming in between 1.7% and 2.0%). The Fed's projections, recall, are based on FOMC members' assessment of "appropriate monetary policy". The extention of Twist is not designed to push 2012 inflation back to a range that includes 2%, in other words; it's simply necessary to keep it within the 1.2% to 1.7% window.

I want to hammer this point home, because it's really remarkable. Fed members claim to care equally about the employment and inflation sides of their mandate, yet the unemployment rate has been at least 2 percentage points above the FOMC's estimated natural unemployment rate for nearly 4 straight years while inflation has scarcely wandered more than a half percentage point away from target since late 2009. Fed members claim that the 2% target is not a ceiling, but inflation has been below 2% much more often than it has been above it over the past 4 years, inflation is projected to be at most 2% in 2013 and 2014, and inflation is projected to be substantially below 2% in 2012. In other words, the Fed is actively pursuing a policy of disinflation despite the fact that annual inflation is roughly at target while unemployment is well above its structural rate. That is, the Fed has gone from merely failing at its job to aggressively failing at its job.

Second, it is difficult to pin blame for this on anyone other than Chairman Ben Bernanke. The June policy vote ran 11-1, suggesting that Mr Bernanke is not getting the most expansionary policy for which he can find a majority. One is forced to conclude that this is the policy, and by extension the recovery, that Mr Bernanke wants.

The question, of course, is why he wants it this way. One optimistic possibility is that he doesn't actually. The Fed could be preparing a more aggressive approach to easing but wants to see a bit more data or take a bit more time ironing out the new policy before deploying it. There is hope in markets and elsewhere that such is the case, but after several years of disappointing policy it seems like wishful thinking to expect it.

Another possibility is that Mr Bernanke has no confidence that he can do more. That would be a stunning revelation, if true. It would cut against economic theory, against his own impressive academic work, against his comments as Fed chairman, and against the FOMC's policy statement, not to mention recent experience. The Fed could go for a bold change in tactics—like a change in its policy target—but that wouldn't be necessary to have a stimulative impact. Indeed, a simple communication indicating that the Fed would welcome inflation temporarily above target while unemployment remains high, combined with a new round of QE to show markets it means it, would prove strongly expansionary. There are many things the Fed could do to raise demand closer to potential output if it wanted to do so.

The chairman may believe, however, that the costs of doing more outweigh the benefits. My colleague quotes Mr Bernanke as saying:

There is an issue about whether or not there's sufficient stimulus in the economy. We are now at the zero bound [of interest rates] and the types of unconventional programmes that are available…we know less about them, they have various costs and risks and for that reason, we might get a different amount of financial accommodation in this kind of regime than one where short term interest rates can be varied freely.

These are flimsy excuses indeed. Mr Bernanke has engaged in plenty of handwaving to this effect over the course of the recovery. What he hasn't done is endeavour to demonstrate just what these costs are and how they compare to almost a decade of high unemployment. Given the staggering human and economic cost of that labour-market slack, one would assume that Mr Bernanke could point with some confidence to relatively clear data on what must be truly enormous potential costs to greater expansionary action. And yet oddly he doesn't.

None of us know precisely what is going on in Mr Bernanke's head. Maybe someday we'll all find out. But we don't actually have to know what the chairman is thinking to subject him to appropriate accountability. We have explicit policy directives set for the FOMC by the government: the dual mandate. And we have an explicit policy goal which the FOMC determined for itself to be the best way to meet those policy objectives: its 2% inflation target. Set aside for now the question of whether that determination is correct. The FOMC is persistently failing to meet its objectives, and an accountability moment is long overdue.