4. The money illusion by Scott Sumner
“The Money Illusion” by Scott Sumner is a book-length work on market monetarism written by its leading scholar. The book argues that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong.
Instead, the author claims that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet.
The book is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, and its leading voice in economics writes it. It is based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, making it highly accessible and easy to understand. It lays the groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.
