It has become commonplace in monetary policy discussions in the U.S. to say that the Fed is "missing on both sides of its dual mandate."1 This is often taken to imply that current Fed policy is necessarily far away from an ideal or optimal policy. I do not think that such an inference necessarily follows. The notion that one can easily infer something about the sub-optimality of policy by observing current levels of inflation and unemployment is imprecise. In fact, observing that the Fed is "missing on both sides of the mandate" says little or nothing about the appropriateness of current policy.