Scott Sumner

Archive for Scott Sumner

A Possible Scenario In Which the SNB Wouldn’t Want 100% of GDP in Euros

What is really odd in the econoblogger debate over the SNB’s recent decision to drop the Swiss franc/euro peg is that some people (including prominent monetary economists) are acting like there is not even a possible danger here. Bill Woolsey actually asked me in the comments here at Free Advice: “Is the argument here that […]

Scott Sumner Busts Krugman

Scott Sumner has been lighting it up at EconLog in his running commentary against Keynesians, notably Paul Krugman. (The two most recent examples are here and here, but it goes back further.) Scott’s running theme here is that guys like Krugman picked the U.S. austerity episode as the hill to die on, and then when […]

Scott Sumner’s Incredible Arguments on the Swiss Currency Peg

My latest at Mises CA. If you’re in a rush, here’s the graph to accompany Scott Sumner’s defense (made in December before the dropped it) where he said it was a piece of cake to maintain the peg: I found some monetary base data that is quite interesting. From January to September 2011 the Swiss […]

Standard Financial Models Wouldn’t Predict That Yields Would Spike After End of QE3

When it helped his cause, Krugman understood the stock/flow distinction and why you wouldn’t think the well-anticipated end of asset purchases would cause a sudden change in market price. Yet that didn’t stop Krugman from arguing recently that Treasury yields since the end of QE3 must mean Fed hasn’t been holding down yields. I walk […]

Scott Sumner Can’t Stand When People Use Interest Rates to Gauge the Stance of Monetary Policy

He hits a familiar theme in the opening sentence from a recent post: “There are days where everything seems hopeless. I still find that 98% of the pundits I read don’t even understand that low rates don’t mean easy money.” But wait, there is at least one other man who gets it. Sumner explains that […]

Can I Pass the Scott Sumner Turing Test?

I have been reading Scott pretty regularly since mid-2009 at least, and at this point I’m pretty sure I have learned his pet peeves. For example, when this analyst writes: “Might falling oil prices affect AD? Not with monetary offset–the Fed will simply adjust the date at which they start raising rates.” …then I think […]

Yes Scott Sumner Is “the NGDP Guy”

I explain why he has been pigeonholed. For example, he has said the Fed is more powerful than God because it controls NGDP. More substantively, I produce the following chart: So yes, Scott is right that some economists foolishly thought monetary policy was tight in the Weimar Republic because nominal interest rates were high. But […]

“NGDP” Is An Artificial Construct Invented By Economists

Don’t let Scott Sumner tell you otherwise. The meat from my latest Mises CA post: Regardless of the usefulness of (nominal) GDP as an economic statistic, Scott Sumner (and perhaps some of his fellow Market Monetarists) are incorrect when they lead their readers to believe that this is a “raw” empirical fact, which requires no […]