Scott Sumner

Archive for Scott Sumner

Science Is Prediction: Back-Testing the Market Monetarist-Endorsed Ted Cruz Explanation for the 2008 Crash

(Please don’t lecture me on the post title: I am making a wisecrack related to Dan’s very useful advice on a previous post.) Recently Ted Cruz was grilling Janet Yellen. So far, so good. But then he said: Senator Cruz: In the summer of 2008, responding to rising consumer prices, the Federal Reserve told markets […]

Scott Sumner, the Rortyian Historian

Scott Sumner has flirted with the notion that there is no such thing as truth, that “truth” is whatever your colleagues let you get away with. (I’ve dug up this post of him merely talking about it, but I’m pretty sure there are others where it looks like Scott is receptive to the idea.) And […]

Scott Danger Sumner

(Get it?) Am I the only one who finds this an odd set of statements from the resident monetary expert at EconLog? I’ll add my bold so you see where I’m coming from. Everyone seems to assume that the zero lower bound is the key problem. But how do we know this? Has the lower […]

From the Comments, Quoting Myself on the Gold Standard and Scott Sumner

Apparently I do a great impression of a sphinx. This comment might clarify what I was trying to get across in my previous post: E. Harding now we go from “the monetary deflationary shock so obviously caused the Great Depression that it’s hard to deny it” to “it didn’t matter”? That’s a lot of goalpost […]

Sumner, the Gold Standard, and the Great Depression

Scott Sumner’s new book on the Great Depression is coming out December 1. This is definitely something I will get and digest next year, as I’m swamped. I believe the blurbs when they say this will be a classic in the field. Among other things, Scott has (apparently) interspersed newspaper clippings and real-time financial market […]

An Interesting Hypothesis

So it’s a puzzle: Ben Bernanke as an academic recommended policies that, in the opinion of market monetarists, would actually have required a smaller expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet inexplicably, once Bernanke assumed a position of immense power, all of a sudden those beliefs went […]

Potpourri

==> I’m tied up on this business trip, so somebody please explain to Scott Sumner the difference between time deposits and demand deposits. ==> BTW I am tough but I am fair: I think I forgot to blog it at the time, but this Sumner post on Krugman from September was the best takedown I […]

Explaining the Parable of the Thermostat

At first I was getting really frustrated with Craw and then Gene in the comments of this post. I couldn’t believe they were accusing me of misrepresenting Scott Sumner’s views; I thought I was almost literally quoting him, with the exception of translating the discussion into the world of a household thermostat (which of course […]