January 06, 2014
That’s because Larry Summers is right and John Taylor is just obscuring reality. The NYT did a disservice when it reported on Larry Summers’ concern for a period of secular stagnation that predated the downturn and then gave Taylor’s response:
“If Mr. Summers’s theory is accurate, said John B. Taylor, a Stanford economist who served in Republican presidential administrations, ‘You would have expected the economy to not have been working so well before the crisis. He says it wasn’t. I say it was.’
“Mr. Taylor said that such measures as inflation, housing investment and unemployment showed a strong economy leading up to the crisis.”
Actually the story of secular stagnation is totally consistent with one where growth can be temporarily spurred by a housing bubble. The growth created by the bubble can bring down unemployment and raise output to near capacity, but it is not sustainable. There is nothing that Taylor said that is in anyway inconsistent with a story of secular stagnation.
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