Arthur Burns in the 1970s...
Sounding a little bit like the fish in The Cat in the Hat: "'This is not a good game!' said the fish to the cat...":
Each temporary surge in inflation was quickly followed by--or in the case of the mid-1970s oil shock inflation cycle roughly coincident with--an increase in unemployment. Each cycle in the late 1960s and 1970s was larger than the one before: unemployment peaked at around 6 percent in 1971, at about 8.5 percent in 1975, and at nearly 10 percent in 1982-83. Congress attempted to legislate full employment. Federal Reserve chair Arthur Burns pushed back: “[The] Humphrey-Hawkins [proposal]... continues the old game of setting a target for the unemployment rate. You set one figure. I set another figure. If your figure is low, you are a friend of mankind; if mine is high, I am a servant of Wall Street.... I think that is not a profitable game...” (Wells (1994))
