Ambrose Evans-Pritchard comments on Market Monetarism

The excellent British commentator Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Daily Telegraph has a comment on the Euro crisis. I am happy to say that Ambrose comments positively on Market Monetarism. Here is a part of Ambrose’s comments:

“A pioneering school of “market monetarists” – perhaps the most creative in the current policy fog – says the Fed should reflate the world through a different mechanism, preferably with the Bank of Japan and a coalition of the willing.

Their strategy is to target nominal GDP (NGDP) growth in the United States and other aligned powers, restoring it to pre-crisis trend levels. The idea comes from Irving Fisher’s “compensated dollar plan” in the 1930s.

The school is not Keynesian. They are inspired by interwar economists Ralph Hawtrey and Sweden’s Gustav Cassel, as well as monetarist guru Milton Friedman. “Anybody who has studied the Great Depression should find recent European events surreal. Day-by-day history repeats itself. It is tragic,” said Lars Christensen from Danske Bank, author of a book on Friedman.

“It is possible that a dramatic shift toward monetary stimulus could rescue the euro,” said Scott Sumner, a professor at Bentley University and the group’s eminence grise. Instead, EU authorities are repeating the errors of the Slump by obsessing over inflation when (forward-looking) deflation is already the greater threat.

“I used to think people were stupid back in the 1930s. Remember Hawtrey’s famous “Crying fire, fire, in Noah’s flood”? I used to wonder how people could have failed to see the real problem. I thought that progress in macroeconomic analysis made similar policy errors unlikely today. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We’re just as stupid,” he said.”

So Market Monetarism is now being noticed in the US and in the UK – I wonder when continental Europe will wake up.

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Update: Scott Sumner also comments on Ambrose here – and in he has a related post to the euro crisis here.

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2 Comments

  1. Alex Salter

     /  November 28, 2011

    The political economy/public choice story is that German bankers have a lot to gain from the crisis, since they actually have some capital which they can trade for increased political influence in the EU going forward.

    Reply
  1. Sumner and Glasner on the euro crisis « The Market Monetarist

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