Commentary Future economists may well look back at the end of 2020 as the moment when the most powerful central bank in the world flinched and decentralized finance came of age. In retrospect, that was when the Fed publicly lost control of inflation and its own credibility in the process. After all, the time to soften the flow of free dollars into the U.S. economy was when consumer prices started accelerating faster than the Fed’s 2 percent target … and not months into the inflationary cycle. At this point, it could take another two to four years to get prices back under control. Don’t blame the pandemic. While the Fed’s initial impulse was to protect the economy by flooding the system with cash, a secondary agenda crept into the policy statements early on. Central bankers were using the lockdowns to resolve their own confusion over the persistent absence of inflation …