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Summer's argument is that the output gap at the beginning of the Biden administration was much smaller than the scale of the stimulus bill the administration was attempting to pass. It's possible to say, "We need some stimulus, but not that much, which will be inflationary".
Your second link is March 2020.
And Summers was warning about the scale of the stimulus package in February, 2021.
The point is that he did. They have like, models that let them distinguish between situations.
So, this is getting a bit into the weeds on the question, but the way to think of the relationship between fiscal stimulus and inflation is by thinking of the stimulus as just the same as anyone with a sufficiently large credit card. The path of monetary policy that achieved low, steady inflation prior to the over-sized stimulus at the beginning of the Biden administration probably looked something like slow rate hikes over the course of late 2021 and 2022 that eventually brought rates up to some point lower than they are going to end up being in our current timeline. The monetary stimulus of 2020 had been enough to prevent the lockdowns from causing serious, deep, long-lasting depression and opening up would have brought total spending back into line with the non-pandemic growth path of 2019 without the Fed having to slam on the breaks.
Then a huge amount of additional spending happened. The Fed suddenly had to change stances to a tighter policy sooner in order to stave off inflation but, importantly, they didn't. Inflation started to spike long before the Fed even started talking about tightening. Then they took most of a year before they started actually tightening.
So, it's still monetary policy causing the inflation (as only monetary policy can cause sustained inflation), but it's the stance of monetary policy being suddenly far too loose as a result of a change in the environment, rather than a change in the policy instrument. If the Fed had followed a policy path similar to its path in real life in a hypothetical world where the 2021 stimulus didn't happen or was much smaller, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder. If the Fed had appropriately offset the 2021 stimulus by moving forward and scaling tightening plans from the second half of the year or the next year to the first half of 2021, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder.
That is what I said, which for some reason people disagreed with, and my post was downvoted a bunch of times so i deleted it .
here is what I wrote:
With perfect hindsight, interest rates should have started going up after the stock market made new highs, which was in late 2020 instead of waiting until q2 of 2022. But this would have caused a market crash anyway.
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