By Marek Fuchs

Gap (GPS), the nation’s biggest mall retailer, today stands somewhere better than bruised if still short of being permanently healed from past wounds. The evident improvement of its stores – to stay nothing of the stock’s bumptious performance over the past year, up roughly two-thirds since the start of 2012 – has, however, led to a slightly unwarranted sense of certainty over Gap’s earnings, which will be released after the close of Thursday’s trading.

[See related item: Gap: Company of the Year]

“Gap's 4Q results to show continued turnaround,” says The Associated Press in a representative headline. Motley Fool, for its part, went one step further; they are already letting Gap take a victory lap, pointing to “How Gap's Focus on Brand Made the Difference” in a headline that ran a full two days before earnings.

Have the media suddenly turned telepathic ? Hardly. A key – and neither of these articles mentioned a word of it – is that Gap pre-announced its fourth-quarter

By Daniel Hanson

While being questioned in his Semi-Annual Report to Congress, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was criticized as dovish for his expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet. In response, Bernanke retorted, “You called me a dove...My inflation record is the best of any of the governors in the post-war period.”

The Bernanke Fed has interpreted its mandate for price stability as a call for a 2 percent inflation target. Fearing deflation, the tolerable lower bound for inflation at the Bernanke Fed has been about 0.6 percent, as the Fed initiated a $600 billion program in 2010 to combat deflation after the core consumer price index dropped to this low. In the name of spurring employment growth, the Bernanke Fed is willing to tolerate inflation as high as 2.5 percent, a position articulated in the FOMC’s December 2012 policy statement.

By and large, Bernanke has been successful in staying within these parameters. Headline inflation has averaged 2.3 percent since Bernanke took