The Money Illusion, Scott Sumner
The Money Illusion, Scott Sumner
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The Money Illusion
Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy

Author: Scott Sumner

Narrator: Steven Jay Cohen

Unabridged: 14 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/23/2021


Synopsis

Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It’s happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of this century.

Foregoing the usual relitigating of the problems of housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argues that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet. The Money Illusion is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, written by its leading voice in economics. Based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, this highly accessible audiobook lays a groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.

About Scott Sumner

Scott Sumner is the Ralph G. Hawtrey Chair of Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is the author of The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression and the economics blog TheMoneyIllusion.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Peter on December 31, 2021

This is the best book on macroeconomics that I'm aware of, with a focus on the causes of the 2008 recession. Most of the book's important points are based on ideas that economists respect in many contexts outside of macroeconomics, but which seem controversial in the context of macroeconomics. It's ir......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on January 03, 2022

I have a personal rule to never read or think about monetary policy as it is too complicated for me to understand. I made an exception for The Money Illusion 1) out of respect for Scott, who is such a thoughtful and interesting blogger (about non-monetary subjects) and 2) Market Monetarism seems pot......more

Goodreads review by Joshua on January 24, 2022

Anybody even slightly interested in monetary policy must read this book. Even if you disagree with the author's arguments, he does an excellent job addressing reasonable critiques and explaining many fundamental concepts. The book also does an excellent job of identifying frequent mistakes people ma......more

Goodreads review by Zo on February 27, 2022

Really great book that could serve as an introduction to monetary economics for someone with no background while also containing frontier insights. I probably have more exposure to Sumner's way of thinking about monetary theory than his "competitors" -- New Keynesians, Old Keynesians, Austrians, neo......more

Goodreads review by Tomas on January 30, 2022

NGDP targeters are delusional just like the MMTers, they have their own top-down theory: the central bank is omnipotent and can always bring NGDP to the previous path. They have their own interpretation of history and own theory of the great depression, QE in Japan works, the dot com bubble was not......more