I read this short interview with Paul Volcker and turned up some large nuggets of wisdom.

“Inflation is a more fundamental danger than speculative investment. Some countries seem to be in the unusual situation where they are trying to create inflation. They will come to regret that. People think they can manipulate the economy in a way that produces a little good inflation to go along with better economic activity. That’s silly. In Japan, they seem to think that they will snap their fingers and have inflation of 2 percent and the economy will recover. We may say that we are aiming for nominal GDP of, say, 5 percent. Who thinks you can really do that? It doesn’t correspond to the real world. When have economists been able to predict how much will be inflation and how much real economic activity?  Monetary policy has little or no control over the real economy and issues, and yet we persist in using it as a tool for generating growth.”