From the New York Times:
Cliff Asness, one of the signers of the infamous open letter warning Ben Bernanke that his policies risked debasing the dollar, weighs in with a complaint that I am being a big meanie. As Brad DeLong immediately notes, what Asness mainly ends up doing is showing that he doesn’t at all get the whole notion of the liquidity trap, and the resulting irrelevance of monetary expansion to both prices and output.Clearly, Asness has never read anything at all on the subject — not what I’ve written, not what Mike Woodford has written, not what Ben Bernanke has written. And he seems to view the failure of inflation to follow from quantitative easing as some sort of weird coincidence, not what anyone who applied basic macroeconomics to the situation predicted.Now, I understand that busy people can’t keep track of everything, and even that you can sometimes be a successful money manager without reading up on monetary economics. But if you’re one of those people who don’t have time to understand the monetary debate, I have a simple piece of advice: Don’t lecture the chairman of the Fed on monetary policy.
See also at the NYT:
The Civility Whine
At this point in the great inflation-deflation debate, a lot of what the inflationistas have to say takes the form of whining about the rudeness of their critics — of course, me in particular. I would say that this is a de facto confession that they’ve run out of substantive defenses for their position — although I guess I would say that, wouldn’t I?But there’s something else you should know: the inflation derpers aren’t just ignorant about monetary policy, they also don’t understand the rules of argument. In particular, the constant complaint about “ad hominem” attacks shows that they don’t know what that means....MORE
