CALCULATED RISK notes that Federal Reserve governors aren't exactly singing the same tune in public comments on the likely path of monetary policy. Nemo points out that the public disagreements have become remarkably common and overt—and, he says, pointed:

John Jansen has an explanation:

RBS Securities (the firm formerly known as Greenwich Capital) mentioned an interesting article by well respected research firm Wrightson in which Wrightson posits that some of the recent hawkish comments by Federal Reserve officials are a shot across the bow of leveraged speculators. Wrightson makes the salient point that if the trajectory of rates is unclear then leveraged positions are not such safe bets. That is I think a key and under appreciated point with the new world of Federal Reserve transparency regarding policy. The last Federal Reserve tightening cycle was completely transparent and consisted of 17 consecutive 25 basis point rate hikes which took the funds rate target to 5.25 percent from 1 percent. But Mr Greenspan diminished the effect of the tightening and never thoroughly damped down speculative excess as he made it manifestly clear that he would not raise rates in anything other than discrete 25 basis point intervals. In so doing he allowed the junk which led to the current financial debacle to flourish.

There is an interesting similarity in this to an argument Larry Summers made several years ago, which was highlighted in the recent Ryan Lizza profile:

In 2007, Summers started looking at the looming economic crisis. Back in 2003, he had attended a Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in which economists were celebrating the fact that central bankers seemed to have mastered the use of monetary policy to tame inflation without causing the economy to slip into a recession, as had happened in the past. Summers warned that perhaps the victory over inflation meant only that the next recession would be caused by some new phenomenon... In the fall of 2007, his Financial Times columns took on a more urgent tone, starting with a piece on November 25th, titled “Wake Up to the Dangers of a Deepening Crisis.” There had been at least six major financial crises that affected the United States over the past twenty years: the 1987 stock-market crash, the 1990 savings-and-loan crisis, the Mexican-peso crisis, the East Asian economic crisis, the failure of Long Term Capital Management, and the tech-bubble crash. Summers had a theory that tied them together: whereas for many decades most recessions were caused by the Federal Reserve’s attempts to curb inflation, the Fed’s recent mastery of keeping inflation in check had given rise to the financial crisis. Summers explained that, just as the success in curing infectious disease will allow some people to live longer only to die of cancer, the success in battling inflation will prolong an economic expansion only to lead to overconfidence and a financial crisis...

Perhaps the Fed is beginning to think that having control over the business cycle is more important than producing long expansions and frequent bubbles.