Crítica de Scott Sumner a DeLong y Summers

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Lars Christensen lo apoya:

"Said in another way Scott – as do I – strongly believe that the impact of fiscal policy strongly dependent the monetary policy reaction to fiscal tightening or fiscal easing (Even today Scott has a discussion of the fiscal multiplier). In fact I don’t even think it is meaningful to talk about fiscal policy as something that can “stimulate” demand. Hence, in a pure barter economy we cannot imagine fiscal policy having any impact on demand as demand always will equal supply in a barter economy. The famous Say’s Law holds in a barter economy and as such there would be full crowding out of fiscal policy. Hence, fiscal policy will only have an impact on demand if monetary policy “plays along”.

Our view is however far from the consensus among economists. Rather most economists think that you can use fiscal policy to “manage” nominal spending/demand. Even economists who in general do not find activist fiscal policy desirable tend to think that fiscal policy can impact nominal demand.

Today after working on some macroeconomic models myself I finally realised that the problem is that the “models” that most economists have in their heads are missing an equation (or at least one equation). Hence, most economists – and here I am talking about practicing macroeconomists like central bank economists or financial sector economists like myself – tend to give very little or no attention at all to the monetary policy regime of the economy they are analysing.

Therefore, the missing equation in most “models” is the policy reaction function of the central bank."

Un par de links sobre Delong y Summers (y de otras cosas)