Why Washington Can’t Quit Listening to Larry Summers

In early June, The New York Times surveyed the economics departments at a handful of universities with notable economics programs — Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ohio State University — and many academics do share Mr. Summers’s concerns. A sizable minority said they worry that inflation will rocket higher. And about half of respondents who work in macroeconomics agreed that the latest stimulus package was “significantly” too large.

That’s the view inside the academy. The message from economists currently in power is different. Top Fed officials have said that sustained high inflation is not likely, and that they expect temporary data quirks and bottlenecks will fade.

“A pretty substantial part — or perhaps all — of the overshoot in inflation comes from categories that are directly affected by the reopening of the economy,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed’s chair,…

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