[3] After Ben Bernanke's announcement of a new round of quantitative easing on September 13, 2012, which open-endedly committed the FOMC to purchase $40 billion agency mortgage-backed securities per month until the "labor market improves substantially", some media outlets began hailing him as the "blogger who saved the economy", for popularizing the concept of nominal income targeting.

[5] During the 2007–2008 financial crisis, Sumner began authoring a blog where he vocally criticized the view that the United States economy was stuck in a liquidity trap.

[8] In 2012, the Chronicle of Higher Education referred to Sumner as "among the most influential" economist bloggers, along with Greg Mankiw of Harvard University and Paul Krugman of Princeton.

[14] Summarizing this thinking, The Economist suggested that a growth rate of 5.3% would result in concerns over (future) inflation and tightening of monetary policy, largely because 5.3% is beyond both projections and goals of the Federal Reserve.

[16][17][18] Sumner has criticized populists like Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, referring to them as the "new axis of evil".

[22][23] Well known in Bentley's economics department as a "technophobe," Sumner, who purchased his first cell phone in 2011, apparently "triggered expressions of surprise and amusement when he informed his colleagues that he was starting a blog.