I don't think the Fed is trying to generate inflation, simply because if they wanted to they could. If you look at their own reports, however, we clearly don't have inflation and aren't going to for a long time. About 20 trillion dollars have been wiped out of the money supply. The trillion dollars of printing so far is like hoping taking a piss will turn a tsunami. And most of that trillion dollars has been taken by the banks and put right back into the federal reserve system. Check out banks' reserves. Any money the Fed has given out hasn't affected spending in any way.
There is a way they could get inflation going: if the government prints money (i.e. not borrows printed money) and gives it away to people, e.g. by lowering taxes a lot. But they can't. And we all know they cant.
hell, the last Bush sent everyone a cheque for three hundred bucks. (and the liberals complained... even though it was the most progressive tax cut of my lifetime. Not the whole package, of course, but mailing everyone the same flat three hundred bucks. For me, that was a pretty small tax cut... but for some people that was almost a 100% tax cut.) why couldn't that happen again with larger cheques? The republicans are no longer restraining it; naked Keynesisim seems to be the order of the day, at least when the economy is in the toilet.
If we see significant deflation, the government /will/ take action to prevent it. What and how effective that action will be is anybody's guess... my understanding, though, was that Ben Bernanke has mentioned this ability to print money to avoid inflation before.
Anyhow... I'm not saying that we will see big inflation, just that it seems quite reasonable for a layman to see a /chance/ that we will have inflation at some point in the near future. hedging some against that chance, I think, is a rational thing to do.
There is a way they could get inflation going: if the government prints money (i.e. not borrows printed money) and gives it away to people, e.g. by lowering taxes a lot. But they can't. And we all know they cant.