My views on St. Louis Fed President James Bullard have changed. I remember Tim Duy was critical of his reasoning a while back at his blog and Bullard responded. The two had a polite dialogue and I was impressed by that even if I disagreed with Bullard. Now he's making sense and has become reality-based. Commenter and Fed-watcher Mark A. Sadowski says he has always been reality-based.

James Bullard: This is why I dissented at the Fed meeting this week by Neil Irwin and Ylan Q. Mui

J.B.: I was a big advocate of QE2, and if you remember what happened with QE2, we adopted the program in November 2010. At that point, inflation was quite low, and inflation expectations had dropped a lot. That all turned around in the first half of 2011. There was a global commodities boom. The Fed got criticized for that. By the end of 2011, even core inflation, even with all this slack int he economy, core inflation had gone to 2 percent. My feeling at that point was our work here is done. Because i though the Fed had done exactly what we needed to do to keep us out of the Japanese situation and push inflation back to target, and that we could start to think about how to normalize policy. 

But since the first part of 2012, inflation measures have been coming back down, so now we’re back in a low inflation environment, lower than i expected. yet the committee has sort of turned maybe a little bit more circumspect about how they want to respond to that. 

That’s where we are. One thing that hasn’t happened this time, when we adopted this QE3, and really the full-fledged QE3 is really December of 2012. We’ve been in this game for about 5 months. And we have not had the. What’s missing? It’s the global commodities price boom that occurred with QE2 , that is not occurring this time. It’s really clear why that is. Europe’s in recession and China’s slowing. That’s why. From our perspective, we could say let’s continue and provide more accommodation, because that channel isn’t hitting us so hard this time as it did during QE2. Why don’t we just continue the program, and eventually inflation will go back up to target? I guess that’s how I’m thinking about it right now.

No mention of the sequester?