The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been giving it to the Federal Reserve but good over the past few years for a massive easing program that has produced only a mild economic recovery.

But now former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is giving it back to The Journal. He takes issue with an editorial in the paper this week calling for tighter monetary policy.

"The editorialists point out that the Fed's projections of economic growth have been too high since the financial crisis, which is true," Bernanke, now an economist at the Brookings Institution, writes on his blog.

"Therefore (The WSJ concludes), monetary policy is not working and efforts to use it to support the recovery should be discontinued."

Then come the fighting words.

"It's generous of the WSJ writers to note, as they do, that 'economic forecasting isn't easy.' They should know, since The Journal has been forecasting a breakout in inflation and a collapse in the dollar at least since 2006, when the Fed decided not to raise the federal funds rate above 5.25 percent," states Bernanke, who headed the Fed from 2006 to 2014.

The Journal editors ignore the other side of the coin, Bernanke says. "They fail to note that, while the Fed (and virtually all private-sector economists) have been too optimistic about growth, they have also been consistently too pessimistic about unemployment, which has fallen more quickly than anticipated."

But Harvard economist Martin Feldstein is in The Journal's camp. "The Fed's unconventional monetary policies have created dangerous risks to the financial sector and the economy as a whole," he writes in an article for Project Syndicate.

The Fed's stimulus includes near-zero short-term interest rates and a $4.5 trillion balance sheet.

"The very low interest rates that now prevail have driven investors to take excessive risks in order to achieve a higher current yield on their portfolios, often to meet return obligations set by pension and insurance contracts," Feldstein says.

The result?

"This reaching for yield has driven up the prices of all long-term bonds to unsustainable levels, narrowed credit spreads on corporate bonds and emerging-market debt, raised the relative prices of commercial real estate, and pushed up the stock market's price-earnings ratio to more than 25 percent higher than its historic average," explains Feldstein, chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors.

Related Stories:

• SocGen's Edwards: More Fed Stimulus Coming in Inflationary Push
• Telegraph's Evans-Pritchard: US Economy Isn't as Bad as All That