As Janet Yellen assumes the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Bank, her main competitor for the job, Larry Summers, comments on the current US economy.   The questions he raises will surely have to be addressed by Yellin.

Summers’s argument is that there are deeper problems afoot in the U.S. economy, and that so long as the Fed keeps trying to coax growth through easy money policies, without corresponding efforts by fiscal policymakers to increase demand in the economy or structural reforms to boost the country’s longer-term economic potential, we are consigned to a cycle of endlessly expanding credit and asset bubbles.

“If the United States were to enjoy several years of healthy growth under anything like current credit conditions, there is every reason to expect a return to the kind of problems of bubbles and excess lending seen in 2005 to 2007,” Summers writes, “long before output and employment returned to normal trend growth or inflation picked up again.”  Future Fed Policy