I've been skeptical of using monetary policy to fight unemployment from the get-go, because it seems me to violate the Mr. Natural Rule: You got to use the proper tool for the job.
The problem has been that Congress has had fiscal policy by the throat and have used that position to press a whole raft of bad ideas that sound plausible if you are innocent of both economics and history.
Government is best run like a business.
Deficits are always bad.
Lower taxes always stimulate the economy.
I was skeptical that monetary policy would even work, but I must admit that it has, to a degree. Driving down interest rates pushes money into the stock market, which has more than doubled since the depth of the recession, and at some point that does trickle down into corporate hiring...after they've done all the stuff that strokes shareholders.
Contrast the fiscal solution: you just go out and hire people to fix stuff that needs fixing. Highways, bridges, the electrical grid. It's a great advantage if you are pushing monetary policy at the same time because the borrowing to fix things can be done really cheaply.
This is not a free lunch. Stocks inflated by deflating the bond market will come back down. Borrowed money must be repaid. But unless the people get to work, taxes will never be generated to pay for the lunch. The answer to the problem is not to do away with lunch.
Monetary solutions act as if the problem were lack of money. It's not. Fiscal policy churns the money that's already there, which speaks directly to unemployment.
We've now had the monetary version of stimulus for a length of time equal to a normal business cycle and people are still out of work. What if we have a normal business cycle?
The Fed has already shot every monetary arrow in the quiver.
The GOP idiots are still keeping fiscal policy out of the game.
The end result of the Fed's efforts may have been to delay the sinking of the Great Recession into Great Depression II. But, if you ran the Fed, and Congress was asleep at the switch, would you do nothing? Real people get hurt by this crap. If all you have to fight with is a wooden sword with a garbage can lid for a shield, you gotta fight.
If the economy goes down, the very people who refused to prevent it will be saying they told us so. Germany. 1933.