It hasn’t been an easy year for the man charged with overseeing U.S. economic policy.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has attempted to pilot the world’s largest economy through gyrations in the energy market and a sharp slowdown in the housing market that’s partly led to the current subprime-mortgage mess.

Then there’s Bernanke's superstar predecessor, Alan Greenspan, who can’t seem to stop talking about an imminent recession. Greenspan said the R-word in February, undermining the ability of Bernanke and his merry crew of Fed officials to communicate with the markets.

Bernanke's own style complicates matters. Initially touted as the man who would open up the secretive Fed, he has been accused of being a little too communicative.

First there was his Maria Bartiromo gaffe: He told the CNBC anchor at a gala that the markets were misinterpreting the Fed's intentions. Then Wall Street complained that there were too many Fed officials saying too many different things.

The latest misstep came in March, when the Fed’s Open Market Committee dropped wording from its post-meeting statement that explicitly stated a bias toward raising the federal funds rate.

It was ostensibly a move to prepare the markets for the first interest rate cut since June 2003, and unsurprisingly, investors reacted positively. But just a week after the statement, Bernanke told lawmakers in Washington that inflation “remains uncomfortably high.”

The seeming flip-flop even moved fellow committee member William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, to speak up in early April. "There is a problem when well-informed people in the market come to different conclusions from the same language," he told Bloomberg News. "That tells you that the statement is not completely clear.''

For what it's worth, the numbers back Bernanke’s latest views:

The year-over-year rate in the Consumer Price Index, minus food and energy, was 2.7 percent in January and February—above the Fed's self-defined comfort range of 1 to 2 percent. The figure dropped to 2.5 percent in March according the Department of Labor's latest report.

The spread between the interest rate on the five-year Treasury note and the inflation-protected five-year Treasury note—a gauge of investors’ inflation expectations—has been trending upward since October and was at 2.5 percent on Friday.

Meanwhile, the latest figures from February showed that another Fed benchmark, the price index for personal consumption expenditures, minus food and energy, was 2.4 percent, above the level it was at when the Fed last hiked rates in June.

While price pressures are still elevated, economic activity has been sluggish, with a slowdown in business investment dragging on growth. (In fact, it was surprising that some market participants viewed March’s robust employment report as a sign of a strengthening economy, given that job gains are a classic lagging indicator.)

All this has prompted David Rosenberg, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, to coin a new term: slowflation. It’s not as bad as ’70s-style stagflation accompanied by sky-high interest rates, but it still won’t be easy for Bernanke and the Fed to steer through.