Krugman on the quasi-monetarists (QMs?):

And the diatribes against unorthodox monetary policy seem to me to come completely out of left field, not derived in any way I understand from Koo’s basic analysis. They have the feeling of arguments half-baked on the spot out of annoyance that people aren’t totally buying Koo’s insistence that fiscal policy is the answer; as you can see, I’m for fiscal policy myself, but see monetary policy as a useful supplement.

The queasy quasi-monetarists are, in a way, the mirror image of this position, so focused on the monetary solution that they rail against any suggestion that fiscal policy might play a useful role.

I would submit, by the way, that the quasi-monetarists — QMs? — have actually backed up quite a bit on their claims. They used to say that the Fed can easily and simply achieve whatever nominal GDP it wants. Now they’re more or less conceding that the Fed has relatively little direct traction on the economy, but can nonetheless achieve great things by changing expectations. That’s pretty close to my original view on Japan.

But changing expectations in the way needed is hard, especially when the Fed (a) faces massive sniping from the right and (b) has a number of hard-money obsessives among its own officials.

So my view is that we need to use everything we can — fiscal and monetary policy. And we shouldn’t let a desire to promote our pet solutions block other things that might help.

Well the Senate is blocking Obama's American Jobs Act. Bernanke needs to pull a Volcker.