When former Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher stepped down last March after a decade in that role, the New York Times (of course) wrote his professional obituary under the headline Richard Fisher, Often Wrong But Seldom Boring. Fisher had apparently viewed his own philosophical root and career at the Fed as something of an updated Paul Volcker, not surprising given that Volcker was apparently something of a mentor. Inflation was Fisher’s passion; always.

It was that in the middle of 2008 when he cared more about oil prices and rate cuts, worrying that the Fed might have been too “accommodative.” Speaking in Tokyo in April 2009, he said, “I have a reputation for being the most ‘hawkish’ participant in the deliberations of the Federal Open Market Committee, and I have a record that substantiates that reputation, having voted five times against further accommodation during the commodity-driven price boom of 2008.” If he was against “dovish” policy in 2008, he was more so when often the lone dissenting voice against balance sheet expansion.

Two years after his Tokyo speech, Fisher railed against QE2. “Having done our job, I see many risks to the Federal Reserve overstaying its position. There is the risk that we might breach our duty to hold inflation at bay.” The following April, heading toward QE3, Fisher warned:

I’m just reporting what I hear on the street, which is a real concern that with our expanded balance sheet, we are just a little bit in an ember of what could become an inflationary fire.

Then, the following summer after QE3 and then QE4, Fisher was at his most colorful speaking in Toronto, including himself with former Fed Chair Paul Volcker in a summation of something like modern Shakespeare.

We cannot live in fear that gee whiz the market is going to be unhappy that we are not giving them more monetary cocaine…

Only time will reveal the efficacy of current policy and whether the risks that I and more experienced observers like Paul Volcker fret over are as substantial as we surmise, or whether we have made much ado about nothing

That was in response the bond market’s “taper tantrum” with an MBS rout and actually rising interest rates. He wanted the FOMC to ignore any complications on the road to normalizing policy and the economy. Normalization, of course, didn’t last and “inflation” never did appear (in the official calculations) nor the economic utopia the FOMC had planned. Now a year out of office, Fisher is still worried about inflation and “monetary cocaine”, as if the market’s struggles are related at all to what Janet Yellen will or will not do.