Speaker: Scott Sumner

Date: Tuesday 17 June 2014

Time: 07:00pm – 07:00pm

RSVP: events@adamsmith.org

Location: 10-11 Carlton House Terrace

Map: find us!

Scott Sumner is an American economist who shot to fame between 2009 and 2013 as a result of his blog, themoneyillusion.com, and was in 2012 named the world’s 15th top thinker by Foreign Policy—the same rank as then-Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke.

Prof. Sumner is the father of market monetarism, a macroeconomic school of thought centred on markets and money. Though it takes its foundations from academic work, including that of Robert Lucas, Eugene Fama and of course Milton Friedman, it arose largely on the blogosphere. The Atlantic named Sumner “the blogger who saved the US economy” after his ideas were seen as part of the intellectual support that convinced the Fed to implement QE3. And his view that central banks should target total spending—nominal GDP—rather than consumer price inflation has provoked comment from, among others, Mark Carney.

Prof Sumner teaches at Bentley University, a small, well-regarded private college in Massachusetts. His academic papers—which tackle subjects ranging from whether the US should privatise its mint to the causes of business cycles and recessions—have been featured in prestigious journals including the Journal of Money, Credit & Banking and the Journal of Political Economy.

Please let me (ben@adamsmith.org) know if you’re a journalist and you’d like to arrange an interview with Prof. Sumner.