I recently signed up for Quora. According to Wikipedia Quora “is a question-and-answer website created, edited and organized by its community of users.”

I am not a frequent user of Quora but drop by from time to time and tonight I ran into this question:

Why do some market monetarists advocate fiscal austerity?

That one I obviously had to answer and here it is:

The short answer is the Market Monetarists do not advocate fiscal austerity. What MM’ers are arguing is that monetary dominates fiscal policy. Hence, IF fiscal policy is tightened then it will not necessarily have an negative impact on aggregate demand – or nominal GDP – if the central bank for examples targets inflation or the nominal GDP level. This is known as the Sumner Critique.

The view that monetary policy dominates fiscal policy in the determination of nominal spending in the economy makes Market Monetarists less fearful fiscal austerity than for example keynesians. Furthermore, Market Monetarists are highly skeptical about discretionary policies – both monetary and fiscal – and that leads Market Montarists to advocate rule based fiscal and monetary policy.

In addition most of the leader Market Monetarists thinkers are libertarian or conservative and as such highly skeptical about a large public sector and as a result many Market Monetarists therefore would welcome cuts in public spending. That, however, is not at the core of Market Monetarist thinking.

Finally for most Market Monetarists fiscal austerity is simply about simple arithmetics – in the long run governments cannot spend more money than they bring in. Therefore, for countries that are unable to access the global capital markets – such as Greece – there is no alternative to austerity.

I have written numerous blog posts on these issues on my blog The Market Monetarist. See some of them here:

“Conditionality” is ECB’s term for the Sumner Critique

In New Zealand the Sumner Critique is official policy

Policy coordination, game theory and the Sumner Critique

The Bundesbank demonstrated the Sumner critique in 1991-92

The fiscal cliff is not the end of the world

Cato Institute on US military spending and the fiscal cliff

The fiscal cliff is good news

The fiscal cliff and the Bernanke-Evans rule in a simple static IS/LM model

The fiscal cliff and why fiscal conservatives should endorse NGDP targeting

There is no such thing as fiscal policy – and that goes for Japan as well

There is no such thing as fiscal policy