“Mystique,” Paul Volcker was wont to reply when asked the secret of successful central banking. We have a different recollection of how the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board conquered inflation. The mighty Mr. Volcker succeeded through main force, with an assist from the rock-ribbed editor of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley, who fended off the yowlers after Mr. Volcker started raising the Fed’s target interest rate on October 6, 1979. Not quite two years later, the yield on the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond finally stopped going up. It was just shy of 15%. Mortgage rates were even higher.

But “mystique” is the very word for policies now in place. Today, under the stewardship of Chairman Bernanke, the Fed is operating behind a veil of obscurity. It is easing monetary policy in response to the disturbances in mortgage finance, but it won’t come out and say that it’s easing. It has reduced its discount rate, but not its more familiar, and potent, federal funds rate. It has invited, if not commanded, the big banks to borrow at the so-called discount window, though a loan at 5.75% these days is no great bargain for a solvent bank or thrift institution.

We’ve been thinking about the Volcker cure and the country that was able to withstand it. In just about every way, the 2007 edition of America’s economy is the resilient superior to its 1980-vintage predecessor. It is bigger, more productive, more inflation-resistant, and less energy-dependent. In ways unimaginable in 1980, it is financially and economically connected not only to a Russia once ruled by Stalin’s camarilla and to a China that still displays his portrait in a place of honor.

On the other hand, the United States is more debt-dependent than it was a generation ago. Banks, businesses, hedge funds, and consumers borrow more, and with lighter hearts, than they did in the not-so-distant yesterday of the Carter era. The United States in toto, consuming much more than it produces, is a heavy net borrower, which reminds us of the adage of a Wall Street friend of ours who says: “Leverage is neither good nor bad,” using the word he likes for debt. “It just makes good and bad things happen more suddenly.” It also, however, reduces the borrower’s scope of action.

These leveraged times have cost the Fed itself not a little of its own freedom of action. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down by less than 10% from its all-time high on August 17 when Mr. Bernanke rode to the rescue of the lenders and borrowers. It was a cerebral kind of rescue. Saddling up, the chairman protested that the economy “has continued to expand at a moderate pace.” Only a few days earlier, the Fed had insisted that inflation was still a clear and present danger. Suddenly, frightened by “disruptions in financial markets,” the central bank was prepared to print up billions of new dollars to spread some courage around. Here was mystique for you.

What Mr. Bernake was saying by doing is that, if inflation is tomorrow’s worry, a financial crisis is today’s. Through deeds, if not words, he was saying that our economy is hostage to its encumbered balance sheet. Let’s stipulate that he was within his remit, for the Fed was created by the innocent authors of the Federal Reserve Act back in 1913 not only to secure a sound dollar (it was already gold-backed) but also to forestall any eruptions along the lines of the Panic of 1907.

Which is not to say that today’s disturbances have no remediable cause. Not least was the Fed’s 2002-03 campaign against the supposed evil of slowly rising prices. Spooked by the falling stock market and the 2001 recession, the central bank — then under the leadership of Chairman Greenspan — resolved to avoid, at all costs, the example of Japan and its lost decade of stagnation. Better a little inflation than even a risk of no inflation, reasoned Mr. Greenspan, with the support of his colleague Mr. Bernanke. How to light a fire under the CPI? Push interest rates to the floor and thereby entice more lending and borrowing. This, the Fed did all too well.

New Yorkers don’t envy Mr. Bernanke the tricky choices he faces. But nobody deserves them more than his Federal Reserve. In no small part, the Fed led us into this vale by egging on the nation’s home buyers to borrow too much at interest rates much too low. There may be no going back to fix that error, but, for the future, Mr. Bernanke could begin to make amends by inviting a frank discussion of why the Fed is in the business of fixing an interest rate at all. He might, in addition, reopen discussion about the nature of the dollar. Once upon a time, there was gold behind it. Mystique only gets you so far.