Senate grills Janet Yellen over Fed job

Miami Herald:  WASHINGTON -- Somewhere between Venezuela and Japan is exactly the right spot when it comes to inflation. Getting the United States there could be a key challenge for Janet Yellen.

The country’s central bank right now wants a little more inflation than the current rate of 1.2 percent, lest it sink backward into the kind of deflation that can sap an economy as it has in Japan. At the same time, some economists worry that the Fed’s stimulus of the economy now will have an inflation hangover later, driving an excessive rate of jumping prices such as those that hurt the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and wrack a country such as Venezuela today.

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