Scott Sumner

Archive for Scott Sumner

Sumner vs. Murphy

In a cosmic coincidence, on Monday Scott Sumner released an essay via Mercatus talking about the effectiveness of monetary policy in preventing recessions, particularly if the Fed implements his idea of level targeting NGDP. On Tuesday, my next installment in the “Understanding Money Mechanics” series ran, this one offering a summary and critique of Sumner’s […]

Ironic Juxtaposition

I’m not reading too much into this, just saying I noticed that in back-to-back posts (though one was a re-run) on EconLog this was funny: ==> Bryan Caplan has a post (which was front and center on my phone, but they actually re-ran from June 3) wondering why immigration is even a contentious issue among […]

Scott Sumner Sweepstakes

OK, before I post these links, you have to know the context: When I’m traveling, I basically read the whole internet on my phone. And when I see something that I want to comment on, I save that page. Since I read EconLog and TheMoneyIllusion, I end up accumulating things from Scott Sumner. The reason […]

Murphy vs. the Market Monetarists

It is a dirty rotten lie when people say I just go after Krugman. In my latest for Mises.org, I have a long critique of Scott Sumner and Kevin Erdmann’s narrative of the housing boom/bust. An excerpt: On the face of it, Erdmann is trying to demonstrate that if we use an objective measure, then […]

Austrians Are From Mars, Market Monetarists Are From Venus

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Somehow, Scott Sumner thought Austrians back in 2009 were claiming that the malinvestments of the housing boom “would remain empty for decades.” You can skim the comments at the link to see the twists and turns when I tried to get to the bottom of this assertion. […]

Market Monetarists: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Actually my title doesn’t really make sense; I couldn’t think of anything clever. I really liked this David Beckworth post, talking about the breakdown of the Fed’s “floor system.” In fact, I liked it so much that I based my article in the forthcoming issue of The Lara-Murphy Report on it. So score +1 for […]

Another Bold Sumner Thesis

UPDATE: See my remarks below. Say what you will about Scott Sumner, he’s not afraid to take on conventional wisdom, even when it sure seems to be backed up by staring-us-in-the-face evidence. For example, Scott believes the Federal Reserve adopted an incredibly tight monetary policy and that’s the fundamental explanation for the financial crisis and […]

Trump Gives the World Financial Information; Free-Market Economists Outraged

Folks, this post is about 65% tongue-in-cheek. Anyway, Scott Sumner called it literally an “outrage” that Trump tweeted that he was looking forward to the jobs report at 7:21am, when the numbers weren’t officially released until 8:30am. When arguing with someone in the comments (who had claimed this actually helps the average Joe, because it […]