Scott Sumner

Archive for Scott Sumner

Scott Sumner Better Not Play “Go”

…because he apparently can’t look one move ahead. (Folks, cut me some slack. I’ve been out of town for a while and I’m sure Scott misses me.) Here’s Scott talking about Hit– I mean Donald Trump: Trump does not seem to understand how democracy works. The whole point of conventions is to deny the nomination […]

Efficient Market Bubbles and Why Is Scott Sumner a Libertarian?

I am really swamped with work stuff so I can’t do this justice. But I couldn’t ignore this recent Scott Sumner post at EconLog, in which he asks, “If you believe in bubbles, then why are you a libertarian?” Here’s his argument: I don’t believe in bubbles. In addition, I’m a libertarian. I see those […]

Treasury Yield Curve Over the Last Year

This might be useful to some of you: It’s obvious in the above that the Fed action has raised very short term rates while bringing down longer rates. (To explain some of the movements earlier, remember that markets thought the Fed was first going to raise the fed funds target in September, and then it […]

Hit and Run on Sumner

We have a super duper awesome conference this weekend here at the Free Market Institute, so I have to be brief. Let me first motivate this post by issuing the following statement, to which I want you to react: *** Ten-year bond yields have plummeted to 1.83%, from about 2.2% when the Fed “raised” interest […]

Continuing With My Questioning of Sumner

Scott partially answered my question (which I posted here for your viewing convenience), but he didn’t elaborate on why he uses the formula (i-IOR) to get his desired result that IOR is contractionary, even though higher interest rates per se are expansionary. (It should go without saying that I’m just dabbling within Scott’s framework to […]

Sumner Arguing That Low Interest Rates Are Contractionary

Scott has been posting some interesting stuff on this topic (one, two, three). Many of you–and Scott himself, at the tail end of this post–are bracing for me to go nuts, accusing him of all kinds of inconsistency. But nope, I am far more judicious than you realize. However, I do think there is something […]

Contradicting the Ghost of Sumner Past

Poor Scott has been worried that I’m forgetting him with my running series on David Beckworth. But I couldn’t do that to the most prolific Market Monetarist blogger! So two quick observations on his recent posts. (And barring a marathon Euchre tournament, I’ll do Step #3 in my Beckworth series tonight.) ==> In his most […]

Tackling Ted Cruz

In my latest piece at Mises.org I take on the notion that the Fed’s announcement of “tight” money in the summer of 2008 is ultimately to blame for the financial crisis. I am running around with holiday travel but hopefully by the weekend I will return to my earlier post (here on the blog) about […]