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Scott Sumner
Scott B. Sumner (born 1955) is an American economist. He was previously the Director of the Program on Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and a professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His economics blog, ''The Money Illusion'', popularized the idea of nominal GDP targeting, which says that the Federal Reserve and other central banks should target nominal GDP, real GDP growth plus the rate of inflation, to better "induce the correct level of business investment". In May 2012, Chicago Fed President Charles L. Evans became the first sitting member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to endorse the idea. After Ben Bernanke's announcement of a new round of quantitative easing on September 13, 2012, which open-endedly committed the FOMC to purchase $40 billion agency mortgage-backed securities per month until the "labor market improves substantially", some media outlets be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Market Monetarism
Market monetarism is a school of macroeconomics that advocates that central banks use a nominal GDP level target instead of inflation, unemployment, or other measures of economic activity, with the goal of mitigating demand shocks such as those experienced during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2021–2023 inflation surge. Market monetarists criticize the fallacy that low interest rates always correspond to easy money. Market monetarists are sceptical about fiscal stimulus, noting that it is usually offset by monetary policy. Distinctive features Market monetarists prefer to target the market forecast of future nominal income due to their twin beliefs that rational expectations are crucial to policy, and that markets react instantly to changes in their expectations about future policy, without the "long and variable lags" postulated by Milton Friedman. In contrast to traditional monetarists, market monetarists do not believe that money supply or commodity prices such as go ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Federal Open Market Committee
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is a committee within the Federal Reserve System (the Fed) that is charged under United States law with overseeing the nation's open market operations (e.g., the Fed's buying and selling of United States Treasury securities). This Federal Reserve committee makes key decisions about interest rates and the growth of the United States money supply. Under the terms of the original Federal Reserve Act, each of the Federal Reserve banks were authorized to buy and sell in the open market bonds and short term obligations of the United States Government, bank acceptances, cable transfers, and bills of exchange. Hence, the reserve banks were at times bidding against each other in the open market. In 1922, an informal committee was established to execute purchases and sales. The Banking Act of 1933 formed an official FOMC. The FOMC is the principal organ of United States national monetary policy. The Committee sets monetary policy by specifying ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of wide-reaching economic, social, and political reforms enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, in response to the Great Depression in the United States, Great Depression, which had started in 1929. Roosevelt introduced the phrase upon accepting the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1932 before winning the election in a landslide over incumbent Herbert Hoover, whose administration was viewed by many as doing too little to help those affected. Roosevelt believed that the depression was caused by inherent market instability and too little demand per the Keynesian model of economics and that massive government intervention was necessary to stabilize and rationalize the economy. During First 100 days of the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency, Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, he introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Money Supply
In macroeconomics, money supply (or money stock) refers to the total volume of money held by the public at a particular point in time. There are several ways to define "money", but standard measures usually include currency in circulation (i.e. physical cash) and demand deposits (depositors' easily accessed assets on the books of financial institutions). Money supply data is recorded and published, usually by the national statistical agency or the central bank of the country. Empirical money supply measures are usually named M1, M2, M3, etc., according to how wide a definition of money they embrace. The precise definitions vary from country to country, in part depending on national financial institutional traditions. Even for narrow aggregates like M1, by far the largest part of the money supply consists of deposits in commercial banks, whereas currency (banknotes and coins) issued by central banks only makes up a small part of the total money supply in modern economies. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inflation Targeting
In macroeconomics, inflation targeting is a monetary policy where a central bank follows an explicit target for the inflation rate for the medium-term and announces this inflation target to the public. The assumption is that the best that monetary policy can do to support long-term growth of the economy is to maintain price stability, and price stability is achieved by controlling inflation. The central bank uses interest rates as its main short-term monetary instrument. An inflation-targeting central bank will raise or lower interest rates based on above-target or below-target inflation, respectively. The conventional wisdom is that raising interest rates usually cools the economy to rein in inflation; lowering interest rates usually accelerates the economy, thereby boosting inflation. The first three countries to implement fully-fledged inflation targeting were New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom in the early 1990s, although Germany had adopted many elements of inflati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liquidity Trap
A liquidity trap is a situation, described in Keynesian economics, in which, "after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity preference may become virtually absolute in the sense that almost everyone prefers holding cash rather than holding a debt (financial instrument) which yields so low a rate of interest."John Maynard Keynes, Keynes, John Maynard (1936) ''The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money'', United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 edition, A liquidity trap is caused when people hold cash because they Expectation (epistemic), expect an adverse event such as deflation, insufficient aggregate demand, or war. Among the characteristics of a liquidity trap are interest rates that are close to zero lower bound and changes in the money supply that fail to translate into changes in inflation.Paul R. Krugman, Krugman, Paul R. (1998)"It's baack: Japan's Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap," Brookings Institution, Brookings Papers on Economi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Economy
The United States has a highly developed mixed economy. It is the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). As of 2025, it has the world's seventh highest nominal GDP per capita and ninth highest GDP per capita by PPP. The U.S. accounts for 27% of the global economy in 2025 in nominal terms, and about 16% in PPP terms. The U.S. dollar is the currency of record most used in international transactions and is the world's reserve currency, backed by a large U.S. treasuries market, its role as the reference standard for the petrodollar system, and its linked eurodollar. Several countries use it as their official currency and in others it is the ''de facto'' currency.Benjamin J. Cohen, ''The Future of Money'', Princeton University Press, 2006, ; ''cf.'' "the dollar is the de facto currency in Cambodia", Charles Agar, '' Frommer's Vietnam'', 2006, , p. 17 Since the end of World War II, the economy has achieved relatively ste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2008 Financial Crisis
The 2008 financial crisis, also known as the global financial crisis (GFC), was a major worldwide financial crisis centered in the United States. The causes of the 2008 crisis included excessive speculation on housing values by both homeowners and financial institutions that led to the 2000s United States housing bubble, exacerbated by predatory lending for subprime mortgages and deficiencies in regulation. Cash out refinancings had fueled an increase in consumption that could no longer be sustained when home prices declined. The first phase of the crisis was the subprime mortgage crisis, which began in early 2007, as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to U.S. real estate, and a vast web of Derivative (finance), derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered a stock market crash and bank runs in several countries. The crisis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monetary Policy
Monetary policy is the policy adopted by the monetary authority of a nation to affect monetary and other financial conditions to accomplish broader objectives like high employment and price stability (normally interpreted as a low and stable rate of inflation). Further purposes of a monetary policy may be to contribute to economic stability or to maintain predictable exchange rates with other currencies. Today most central banks in developed countries conduct their monetary policy within an inflation targeting framework, whereas the monetary policies of most developing countries' central banks target some kind of a fixed exchange rate system. A third monetary policy strategy, targeting the money supply, was widely followed during the 1980s, but has diminished in popularity since then, though it is still the official strategy in a number of emerging economies. The tools of monetary policy vary from central bank to central bank, depending on the country's stage of development, inst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prediction Market
Prediction markets, also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives, are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives. They are exchange-traded markets established for trading bets in the outcome of various events. The market prices can indicate what the crowd thinks the probability of the event is. A typical prediction market contract is set up to trade between 0 and 100%. The most common form of a prediction market is a binary option market, which will expire at the price of 0 or 100%. Prediction markets can be thought of as belonging to the more general concept of crowdsourcing which is specially designed to aggregate information on particular topics of interest. The main purposes of prediction markets are eliciting aggregating beliefs over an unknown future outcome. Traders with different beliefs trade on contracts whose payoffs are related to the unknown future outcome and the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mortgage-backed Securities
A mortgage-backed security (MBS) is a type of asset-backed security (an "Financial instrument, instrument") which is secured by a mortgage loan, mortgage or collection of mortgages. The mortgages are aggregated and sold to a group of individuals (a government agency or investment bank) that securitization, securitizes, or packages, the loans together into a security that investors can buy. Bonds securitizing mortgages are usually treated as a separate class, termed Residential mortgage-backed security, residential; another class is Commercial mortgage-backed security, commercial, depending on whether the underlying asset is mortgages owned by borrowers or assets for commercial purposes ranging from office space to multi-dwelling buildings. The structure of the MBS may be known as pass-through security, "pass-through", where the interest and principal payments from the borrower or homebuyer pass through it to the MBS holder, or it may be more complex, made up of a pool of other MBSs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantitative Easing
Quantitative easing (QE) is a monetary policy action where a central bank purchases predetermined amounts of government bonds or other financial assets in order to stimulate economic activity. Quantitative easing is a novel form of monetary policy that came into wide application following the 2008 financial crisis. It is used to mitigate an economic recession when inflation is very low or negative, making standard monetary policy ineffective. Quantitative tightening (QT) does the opposite, where for monetary policy reasons, a central bank sells off some portion of its holdings of government bonds or other financial assets. Similar to conventional Open market operation, open-market operations used to implement monetary policy, a central bank implements quantitative easing by buying financial assets from commercial banks and other financial institutions, thus raising the prices of those financial assets and lowering their Yield (finance), yield, while simultaneously increasing the m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
