Should-Read: David Glasner: Larry Summers v. John Taylor: No Contest

Should-Read: The extremely sharp David Glasner is very sick and tired of John Taylor’s incoherences and evasions. In my experience, Glasner’s net view of Taylor is about average of the private views of monetary economists worth respecting and listening to:

David Glasner: Larry Summers v. John Taylor: No Contest: “‘If a Fed Funds rate higher than the rate set for the past three years would have led, as the Taylor rule implies, to lower inflation…

…than we experienced, following the Taylor rule would have meant disregarding the Fed’s own inflation target. How is that consistent with a rules-based policy?

This is such an obvious point–and I am hardly the only one to have made it–that Taylor’s continuing failure to respond to it is simply inexcusable. In his apologetics for the Taylor rule and for legislation introduced (no doubt with his blessing and active assistance) by various Republican critics of Fed policy… Taylor repeatedly insists that the point… is just to require the Fed to state a rule… [and] when deviating from its own stated rule, to provide Congress with a rationale…. But if Taylor wants the Fed to be more candid and transparent in defending its own decisions about monetary policy, it would be only fitting and proper for Taylor, as an aspiring Fed Chairman, to be more forthcoming than he has yet been about the obvious, and rather scary, implications of following the Taylor Rule during the period since 2003…