The duel mandate for full employment wasn't added until the late 70s.
The Fed, for almost 100-years, has operated with two mandated objectives, namely stable prices and full employment.
This looks like Bernanke avoiding, or trying to avoid, the public coming to some inconvenient conclusions about current and past Fed policy. Number one being the ruse that there is some correlation between monetary expansion and employment. When you run the numbers, there’s just no ‘there’ there. So they’d lose a good part of their justification for QE and other expansionist policies that serve the interest of large Wall St firms and no-one else, often crosswise to the public good.
They’re also (the NY Fed in general, not just Bernanke) palpably afraid of an audit. I can’t say I understand why as most of their shenanigans are already more-or-less open secrets. I can only say it appears at this point there must be something REALLY interesting hidden under the rug over there.
The Evans rule never seemed anything other than a ploy to fake transparency to take some of the heat off Bernanke for continuing to inflate even against the majority opinion of the Board of Governors.
So maybe the move back to Greenspeak is just the Bernankster following the old adage: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit.”?
Those are secondary - the Prime Directive is to save the banks - at all times and with all means - at the public's expense.