Yep, I agree. There definitely seems to be a subtext here of "the fed is super antsy about being up against the zero interest rate 'bound' and now that it has a chance it's going to push as far away from it as it can get before the next big thing hits". Controlling inflation is obviously front and center but the Fed needs to get back to a little more historically normal interest rates too.

Is it entirely the fault of the 2019 rate cuts? No, but, we'd have been starting the 2020 games from a position of at least 2.25% interest (perhaps more like 3% if rate increases had continued) instead of 1.5%, that's 50-100% more room for the Fed to maneuver. What's more, it was a blatantly political and obviously stupid move even at the time, and widely acknowledged as such even at the time. There was no need for stimulus in 2019 when the economy was already roaring and it was "pro-cyclical", ie the opposite of the usual "anti-cyclical" policy.

(Also there's technically no reason that zero has to be a bound... the fed can pay you to take money, if it comes down to it. But all kinds of weird things start happening near zero and I think nobody really wants to fuck around and find out there.)

Anyway, we can also blame congress... the Fed has been begging for a decade for more active fiscal policy from Congress rather than forcing everything to be done via monetary policy. And that means more spending when times are tough, and less spending when times are good. When you're in the situation we were in 2008, it's irresponsible not to spend and leads to overexertion of monetary policy to compensate. But absolutely everything was stonewalled during the 2008-2016 period besides military spending. If Congress had engaged in more sustained stimulus and infrastructure spending during that period, the rates probably could have been pulled up a lot sooner (which is of course the balance to the spending).

And in contrast right now is probably not the ideal time for tons of spending either... but I think we are going to get the wonderful experience of "stagflation", inflation during a recession, so addressing one problem worsens the other. And there's really not any obvious tools to deal with that combination, besides just slowing the economy and letting inflation burn out.

You make a great point about fiscal policy. Around 2010 we saw the beginning of the end of the Fed and Congress being able to work together on monetary and fiscal policy, and that clearly made Yellen (a labor economist with some Keynesian leanings) a lot less confident about raising rates. Powell seemed to substitute this with an uncomfortably close relationship to the Trump white house, which wasn't actually a real replacement for good fiscal policy. I was actually hoping/guessing that Biden in 2020 would replace Powell with someone his party preferred (even if it was Lael Brainard, who is a little too left-leaning for my taste - Raphael Bostic would have been great), but I guess Joe Manchin got in the way of that.