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According to Bill Jamieson in The Scotsman we are at point with Fed policy where the tide of history is decisively shifting:

Economist Stephen King at HSBC believes that the Fed, with the knowledge and support of the US government, is already in the middle of a "five stage strategy" designed to prevent the emergence of deflation and to cure deflation should it actually arrive. The first and second stages - lower short term interest rates and looser fiscal policy - have already been enacted, with mixed results thus far. The third stage, potentially imminent, lies in manipulating the yield curve. The fourth stage, not yet discussed by the Fed but a growing possibility given the high level of private sector debt, is a debt bail-out involving protection against deflation. The fifth stage is the creation of future inflation expectations through any one of a number of options: printing money, price level targets, and incredibly large budget deficits. For a generation of economists and commentators driven by the inflationary crisis of the 1970s into the arms of the Austrian school of economics, this is high heresy. The prime role of central banks was the control of inflation and the very first step was the halting of the printing presses. We are indeed at an historical inflection point, where the established wisdom of the past 30 years is already half way to the incinerator.

(thanks to Jeff Tucker)