Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
Hexapodia Is the Key Insight! By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXVII: A Meta-Podcast on the Ezra Klein Show, Larry Summers Edition; or, The Inflation Outlook Again
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PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXVII: A Meta-Podcast on the Ezra Klein Show, Larry Summers Edition; or, The Inflation Outlook Again

Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Pseudo-Weekly; Aspirationally Less than 60 Minutes.

Key Insights:

  1. Not so much key insights, as key questions: (a) What are the teams? (b) 1920, 1948, 1951, 1974, or 1980? (c) Are there any true members of Team Transitory left? (d) Who is on Team The-Fed-Has-Got-This? (e) Who is on Team Hit-the-Economy-on-the-Head-with-a-Brick? (f) What inflation rate do we want to support economic reopening? (g) What inflation rate do we want to support the sectoral rebalancing—towards goods production, & towards the deliverator economy? (h) How would expected inflation get embedded in the labor market without strong unions and multi-year contracts? (i) How would expected inflation get embedded in the labor market without it first showing up in out-year bond market breakevens?

  1. With Putin’s invasion-of-Ukraine supply shock, Summers’s position looks a lot stronger

  2. Near the zero-lower-bound, there is a high option value to waiting to raise

  3. That optionality still seems to us, for the moment, to be the major consideration

  4. Thus it is too early to hit the economy on the head with a brick—even the small 5%-interest-rates brick

  5. But it is not too early for Jay Powell to furrow his brow and say that the Fed is considering Larry Summers’s arguments very carefully.

  6. Noah Smith finds that he is much more in accord with Larry Summers than he thought he would be.

  7. Larry and Ezra like Brad’s forthcoming Slouching Towards Utopia

  8. Elon Musk should take over Twitter

  9. Hexapodia!

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