Scott Sumner

Archive for Scott Sumner

More Commentary On Gruber

I realize I am biased since I can’t stand his monetary policy views, but does anyone else find these remarks from Scott Sumner a bit…unsettling? There are degrees of dishonesty. When I say I support policy X, I actually do support that policy. I could pass a lie detector test. But when I first started […]

The Vacuity of Scott Sumner’s Approach to Monetary Policy

My latest at Mises CA, sparked by Scott responding to Tyler Cowen on “causality.” The punchline: …I want to point out an odd feature of Sumner’s worldview, which partly explains why it is (arguably) vacuous as an “explanation” of recessions. For the sake of argument, suppose Janet Yellen announces next Monday: “I have been reading the […]

Uncivil War

Matt Bruenig: I am not really sure what Scott Sumner is all about these days. Many years ago, he was like “monetary policy should utilize an NGDP target” and people were like “that’s an interesting thought.” But now, he’s kind of gone into mission creep mode where he comments on things that he’s not so […]

More EMH Silliness

I love this stuff. Scott Sumner scoffs at those thinking Robert Shiller contributed anything useful by warning of a stock bubble in 1996 or a real estate bubble in 2003. He quotes from Fama, who at first seems to blow Shiller up with some numbers. But I’m pretty sure I show that Fama’s arguments make […]

Scott Sumner Warns Against Heterodox Views, Except His

This post at Mises CA actually turned out better than I had first anticipated. As I thought of more pieces of evidence, the case against Sumner became quite powerful–using the very framework he recommended to his readers. (Incidentally, that’s my point here; I’m not attacking heterodoxy. I recognize that Austrian anarcho-capitalist evengelical Christians are not […]

The EMH versus the CAPE

Robert Shiller’s CAPE (cyclically adjusted price/earnings) ratio is well above its historical average: Shiller himself has been pointing out that the only periods since 1881 where the CAPE has been this high were 1929, 1999, and 2007 (on the way up, we should say for precision). Scott Sumner, proponent of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH), […]

The Most Ethically Chilling Use of a Steady-State Equilibrium Ever

Now when Paul Krugman said “death panels” (and sales taxes) were the answer, he was obviously cracking a joke and didn’t mean the phrase in the sense in which the critics used it. So, you can understand why his fans roll their eyes when Krugman critics then tried to use that one-off line against him. […]

Has Tabarrok Too Been Seduced by the Sumner Side?

In an otherwise exemplary post, Alex writes: Milton Friedman argued that the Great Depression was caused by a banking collapse that reduced the money stock and decreased velocity leading to a massive failure of aggregate demand that was not countered by the Federal Reserve…Ben Bernanke also put the banking crisis at the center of his […]