Saturday, October 18, 2014

Amity Shlaes and Cliff Asness Are Not Economists

Now that I have the obvious – can Brad DeLong explain why he wastes his precious time with these two? OK – we have this nonsense to deal with:
Even if what the Fed is doing is not inflationary, the arbitrary fashion in which our central bank responds to markets betrays a lack of concern about inflation. And that behavior by monetary authorities is enough to make markets expect inflation in future.
These two sentences convinced more than ever that no one should ever take Amity Shlaes seriously, but why we are at it, here is what I wrote over at Mark Thoma’s blog:
I'm not sure why anyone wastes time with her or this Cliff Asness person. Neither know anything about economics. My proof? The utter stupidity of their writing as noted in this quote. Hey Amity - we are far below full employment. With nominal interest rates at rock bottom and with the fiscal austerity that your idiot Republican masters have imposed on us - what is left? Oh yea - higher expected inflation might lower real interest rates in spite of the zero interest rate bound. And you think this is a bad thing? Stupid!

5 comments:

Unknown said...

The central bank is "arbitrary"

Dont ya know

(Because that guy doesn't understand what they are doing)

Unknown said...

Thank you for calling these two idiots out. I pondered Shlaes' statement for 3 or 4 minutes yesterday and am still amazed at tortured thinking behind it.

Bud Meyers said...

I was just wondering: How exactly has QE created jobs? Wouldn't direct cash transfers ("helicopter drops") to people instead of commercial banks work a lot better?

http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/forget-qe-send-helicopters-5581

Jack said...

Take Amity's statements one at a time. Let's not quibble about where they fall on the idiot, imbecile, moron continuum.
Statement one: "...the arbitrary fashion in which our central bank responds to markets betrays a lack of concern about inflation." Arbitrary? If so, how so? And without such explanation how is the second half of that statement supported?
"..a lack of concern...," Not!

And then, "And that behavior by monetary authorities is enough to make markets expect inflation in future." Now remember that she started the paragraph with "Even if what the Fed is doing is not inflationary,". Then she goes full circle and suggests that what is being done will somehow cause the expectation of inflation. So even though what the Fed is doing is not inflationary that action by the Fed will bring about an expectation of inflation. For Amity the trek along the idiot to intelligence continuum is but a short step.

Jack said...
This comment has been removed by the author.