Last week, the British publication The Economist piled on to the Fed with an article titled Why the Federal Reserve Has Made a Historic Mistake on Inflation. I’m not sure which was worse, the article itself or the reaction on EconTwitter.

As Politico’s Morning Money pointed out, the Twitter reaction was largely about the headline and the magazine cover. At first, this bothered me as part of the “nobody reads anything anymore” trend. But it turns out that the headline is the best thing about the article.

The article is little more than a tedious rant, weighed down by discontinuous jumps and non sequiturs. It is a list of pedestrian complaints devoid of substance or serious policy alternatives, and it isn’t until the middle of the page that one reads anything about the COVID-19 pandemic and government shutdowns.

Even then, the article only mentions the March 2021 fiscal stimulus as it relates to the pandemic, opining that the economy was “recovering fast after multiple rounds of spending.” Puzzlingly, the article credits the stimulus with adding “extra oomph” to the recovering economy, blasts the Fed because it didn’t apply “the brakes,” and then excuses the Fed for this failure because of “the difficulty of forecasting the path of the economy during the pandemic.”

It tops all of that off by arguing that “Predicting inflation’s return was for those who wore tinfoil hats.” So, why, exactly, should the Fed have known to apply the brakes?

Between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the second quarter of 2020, nominal gross domestic product (NGDP) fell from $21.7 trillion to $19.5 trillion, a rapid decline of economic activity that surpasses anything in the historical record. As states started lifting pandemic‐​related restrictions, and a larger portion of the population received COVID-19 vaccines, businesses began reopening and consumer demand rapidly increased. In fact, from the second quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2020, GDP increased by 10.27 percent, the largest two‐​quarter increase in the historical record.

Then, from the fourth quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of 2021, GDP grew by 8 percent. Yet, the pandemic was not over, and many businesses were unable to supply the consumer goods necessary to meet demand, thus driving prices up. Monetary policy is not equipped to deal with the supply-driven portion of these price increases, and the Fed would have made the situation far worse had it “applied the brakes” at that point.

So, if the folks at The Economist want to gripe about the above-average inflation that followed, they should yell at Congress and the executive branch for refusing to relent on the multiple rounds of fiscal stimulus. Not the Fed.

And while the article has a legitimate complaint about central banks–globally, not just the Fed–expanding their missions to fight things like climate change and to issue digital currencies, it’s rather silly to link these efforts to their failure to predict the rapid change in inflation.

More broadly, what tripped the Fed up was its overly vague and misdirected congressional mandate. The Fed has a great deal of discretion to carry out that mandate, but it can’t simply ignore the maximum employment portion in favor of targeting inflation. The problem here is with the unworkable mandate–not simply with the Fed’s pursuit of a “broad-based and inclusive” recovery.

Criticizing the Fed for this issue is especially strange given that the article acknowledges “the fact” that “the rate of unemployment at which inflation takes off is not something central banks can control.” This fact is precisely why Congress should change the Fed’s mandate. It makes no sense, however, to blame the Fed for overemphasizing any aspect of its statutory mandate.

If The Economist really wanted to be helpful, they would have criticized the mandate itself.

The Fed does not have particularly good price-setting powers, and prices should not always be stable. Fluctuations in the price level can also reflect changes in the scarcity of real goods and services, changes that the Fed should not fight. It is often difficult for the Fed to know in real time exactly what is driving price changes, but the solution is not to always try to have a stable price level.

The solution is to give the Fed a single stable spending mandate. Preferably, one with a clear policy rule so that Congress can hold the Fed accountable for fulfilling its mandate.

The Economist could have also added that Congress should restrict the Fed to have a dramatically smaller footprint in the economy and financial markets, and that Congress should level the field on which the dollar competes with other potential means of payment, thus exposing the Fed to some competitive pressure.

At the very least, these recommendations would have sparked useful conversations. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, because nobody reads anything anymore.