TOO MUCH INFORMATION.(Ben Bernanke on his goals as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board)

When Ben Bernanke took over from Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, five months ago, one of his goals was to make the Fed a more open institution. Whereas Greenspan specialized in tortuously oblique sentences parsable only by semioticians--he once said, "Since I've become a central banker, I've learned to mumble with great incoherence"--Bernanke advocated a plainspoken style. If the Fed was clearer about its intentions, he figured, markets would be less volatile. But, instead of smoothing markets, Bernanke's public statements have confused them, earning him a reputation for flightiness, a quality that no one wants in a central banker. He's been called "Blundering Ben" and a "loose cannon," and investors are saying, Will Bernanke please shut up?

Let's hope not. While Bernanke's attempt to open the doors of the Fed wider has had a rocky start, it's the logical next step in a welcome trend toward transparency that started under Greenspan. Until recently, the Federal Reserve's operations were hidden from the public, so successfully that, in 1981, the Fed beat back a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, asserting that secrecy was indispensable to its operations. The idea that central banks should keep their discussions from the view of mere mortals--known among economists as "monetary mystique"--was seen as fundamental to proper management of the economy. And theorists believed that, for maximum effect, the Fed's decisions ought to come as a surprise.

Over the past twelve years, though, the Fed has been disclosing more information. In 1994, it began announcing publicly whether it had decided to raise interest rates. (Before then, the market simply had to figure out on its own what the Fed was doing.) In 1999, it started including in its statements language that laid out its appraisal of the current state of the economy. And in 2004 it sped up the release of the minutes of its meetings. Few, if any, investors thought these moves were ill-considered. So why does Bernanke's penchant for openness have everyone so agitated?

In part, people are worried simply because Bernanke is replacing one of the best central bankers in history. But their anxiety has been aggravated by the perception that Bernanke has been inconsistent in his commitment to fighting inflation--the Fed's fundamental task. Instead of taking a single inflexible position, Bernanke has offered a nuanced take on whether inflation is becoming a serious problem and on how high the Fed might need to raise interest rates to stop it. At one point, he suggested that the Fed--which has raised interest rates at seventeen straight meetings--might pause before raising them again. But on a later occasion he said that inflation was edging into a range that made him uncomfortable. These are reasonable statements by a policymaker adjusting interpretations to ...