How do I know more than Larry Summers?

Mere electrical engineering and law degree.

And 32 years of tax law experience.

I’m a dolt. I admit it.

But what the fuck is Larry Summers?

Nothing wrong with prior experience in government, and you’d have to get some oldsters if you wanted Carter appointees. As someone typed on another blog, Hamilton Jordan is dead. My objection to Summers isn’t that he’s a Clintonite — it’s that he’s not equipped with the built-in editorial function that everyone in public life must have, but most especially the Fed chair.

Bernanke’s a disaster, an utter failure, and he should be encouraged to leave (for another country, if possible). But replacing him with Summers would be catastrophic. The markets would be on the edge of their seats forever, presuming they could calm down to that point from where they are now. But we would never see equilibrium.

Besides, he thinks women can’t do math, and that’s a disqualifier in a Democratic appointee to anything.

I’m not quite sure where this insistence on using Clinton retreads comes from.

How about this hypothesis:
Obama knows squat about economics. The objective stats of economic performance during Clinton were great: amazing job growth, respectiable growth in the economy and corporate profits, and even a couple of years of rising real wages per worker, a true rarity in the last 30 years. Why wouldn’t Obama want to rehire the crew that produced that outcome? Even adding the tech bubble, and the consequences when it burst, doesn’t diminish the record much, because that burst bubble was manageable with extant fiscal & monetary tools.

You have to peel back the onion one more layer to see that the Clinton economics team were the architects of what went wrong in financial markets during the W tenure. While the wingnuts will sing that song soon enough, I doubt any of O’s advisors are telling him that.

it’s that he’s not equipped with the built-in editorial function that everyone in public life must have, but most especially the Fed chair.

DingDingDingDing!

But according to cnbc on Friday, the financial markets just luv them some Summers. He was the first choice over Geithner, but his mouth got him canned. (Can’t vouch for accuracy; just repeating what cnbc reporters said.)

Or perhaps, as noted repeatedly during the primary, the differences between Obama and Clinton simply weren’t all that significant, and so he’s choosing Clinton people because they’re his sort of people.

I think this is the winning answer. It’s very sad.

I just remembered – during the campaign didn’t Hillary talk about bringing Greenspan back?? These people really don’t want anyone new at the controls. It’s madness.

You have to peel back the onion one more layer to see that the Clinton economics team were the architects of what went wrong in financial markets during the W tenure. While the wingnuts will sing that song soon enough, I doubt any of O’s advisors are telling him that.

Bullseye.

lol, i read that as schumer.

According to the Huffington Post, Summers has been tapped for Director Of National Economic Council, the top economic adviser for Obama. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..45764.html

Sorry to drag things OT so early. Just a heads up Teddy, in case you haven’t yet seen Candace Gingrich: A Letter to My Brother Newt Gingrich. Good stuff.

Does Summers’s name keep coming up because Obama or someone on the transition team think they owe him something? Honestly, this is what I don’t like about any kind of cronyism whether in politics or the corporate world. If I was the boss of anything, I would feel zero obligation to give a friend a job. Sorry, bud, I don’t think you’re a good choice for this but I’ll be glad to put in a good word for you at McDonald’s.

Larry Summers…I’d prefer sportsradio host Steve Somers. At least he’s funny.

What are his views on the economy? Is he another Chicago school person? Is he a Keynesian? What are his thoughts on how to fix the economy?

Change we can bank on?

This is not change we can believe in. Not if Robert Rubin or his protégé, Lawrence Summers, get to call the shots on the economy in President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration. Both Clinton-era treasury secretaries deserve a great deal of the blame for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that has derailed the world economy. They both should, along with former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, perform rites of contrition and be kept at a safe distance from the leadership of our nation.

Yet Rubin and Summers are highly visible in the Obama transition team, with Summers widely touted as Obama’s pick for secretary of the treasury. New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, who also worked in the treasury department under Rubin and Summers, is the other leading candidate. But it was Summers who most vehemently pushed for congressional passage of that drastic deregulation measure, the Financial Services Modernization Act, which eliminated the New Deal barriers against mergers of commercial and investment banks as well as insurance companies and stock brokers. Standing at his side as President Bill Clinton signed the legislation, Summers heralded it as “a major step forward to the 21st century” – and what a wonderful century it’s proving to be.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/…..1479FT.DTL

I am waiting to see what Obama thinks is “change” which got everyone to jump on board. Going BACK to the Clinton people is change even if it is trying to get that lovin feelin back again.

I don’t think that the change that the people had in their minds.

Now if Obi is gonna use these insiders to enact some serious policy changes and have their experience make them work… then that would be OK. But I don’t see this happening.

There’s too much “deference” to wall street and “the markets”. We need to downside their influence to the point where their hysteria and shenanigans doesn’t drag the entire economy into the toilet.

June 21, 2000 – A joint hearing of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry (chaired by Lugar) and the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (chaired by Gramm) was held on the S.2697 , The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

From Gramm’s opening statement:

We want legal certainty for swaps. Most people do not know what swaps are. I am almost incapable of fathoming the volume of swaps in dollar value. When I heard the number as we first started discussing this issue, I was convinced that an error had been made and that someone had mistakenly said trillions instead of billions; I was wrong. This is a huge, critically important markets, and we cannot allow uncertainty about the enforceability of these contracts to stand.

We are all aware that uncertainty occurs because of the off-exchange trading prohibition in the Commodities Exchange Act. If the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deemed these swaps to be futures, that would create this legal uncertainty.

From Summers’ opening statement (testifying is support of the bill):

I believe it is a matter of great importance to the future of our financial system and to the future of our economy to move ahead with legislation that provides legal certainty for swaps and OTC derivatives transactions. And I believe that such legislation is now within our grasp, with the unanimous agreement of the President’s Working Group and the very substantial consensus that has formed in the central area of legal certainty for OTC derivatives among members of these committees, members of the House of Representatives and the various constituencies.

I believe that if anything, the events of the last year, as we have seen dramatic increases in competition in the financial services area across countries, only go to emphasize the
importance of the United States moving to provide legal certainty.

So it is our very great hope that it will be possible to move this year on legislation that, in a suitable way, goes to create legal certainty for OTC derivatives while, at the same time, reducing systemic risk, protecting retail customers, and maintaining U.S. competitiveness.

And it is our belief that the central provisions contained in this bill with respect to OTC derivatives make great progress in achieving these goals and are provisions that we can support as they follow very largely the recommendations of the President’s Working Group.

You might be right cronyism explains it but who owes him? For what?

I thought Bill Clinton was trading with Newt Bill would support Newt’s business ideas and Newt would support what Bill wanted.
Was Bill’s people involved in deregulating the market?

November 2, 1999 – Robert Scheer, writing about what would become the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in the LA Times:

We Sleep as Mammoths Gamble; Heavily lobbied bill being pushed through this week will end measures put in place in the Depression.

Only last week, as the bill was being pushed through a congressional conference committee, Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers rushed back from a trip to China to huddle with lobbyists representing Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and other financial giants. The meeting was closed to the media and public, but one participant told the New York Times that Summers lectured the lobbyists on how to spin this bill so it appears to be in the public interest. “He said it would be very unfortunate if any financial institution were to suggest that they do not see the broad public purpose of this legislation,” the lobbyist reported.

Don’t take my work fully on this, but I would classify him as a neoliberal, Washington consensus type. Deregulation. Global trade liberalization, such as NAFTA, Doha Round. He’s not a supply sider, and would probably favor Keynesia stimulus under current circumstances, but probably does not have enough appreciate for “market failures” and the ability of the strong economic players to extract share out of the weaker ones.

the links above are evidence that summers, while treasury sec for bill clinton, was on the wrong side of the repeal of glass-steagall and the wrong side of the CMFA which prevented the CFTC from regulating otc derivatives (including credit default swaps) and included what came to be know as the enron loophole.

Here’s the definition & history of “Washington Concensus”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus

Great Catch the guy is a hack.

this is getting scary.
i didn’t want anything to do with another Clinton administration. I SAID i’m not sure I know what Obama will do, but I DO sure as hell know what “hil” will do.
and I always felt that he’d be at least OK cause he’d pull in the best of the best and get what he needs with those issues in which he is over his head.
now “hil” is THERE, and no one else is inspiring anything remotely resembling confidence.
could someone please remind him that this entire country is at stake here and in deep chit jeopardy????
someone?????
ANYONE?????
Buehler?????????????????

The PUMAs must be deliriously happy.

But according to cnbc on Friday, the financial markets just luv them some Summers.

I bet addicts love their pushers more than their doctors too.

So half a loaf is better than none? Can we afford half ass measures now when bold big action is required?

Excellent!

The only trouble is that Obama is doing what the addicts want because they paid for 60% of his campaign.

What a gathering of Reptiles.

This can only end badly.

Summer is a jerk, he has proved it whenever he says or does anything. Why does anyone take this creep seriously?

that hypothesis also requires a lack of curiosity.

I can’t qualify his jerkiness but Summers has proven himself to be a man incapable of filtering his thoughts before they come out of his mouth. In my opinion, not a good fit for government.

yeah, like they’re the ones we want to make happy.
you Betcha!
chit………..
i’m getting the ol’ deja vu of “hopelessness” again.

my take as well. big time neoliberal into deregulation and the worst aspects of “free trade”

i

Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?

Contrast the message that Obama is sending, Wall St crooks are in charge of economic policy, with the message he might have sent by choosing people who actually identified what went wrong and what to do about it.

The Build Baby Build jobs program is the only policy I’ve seen advanced by any economist that addresses the heart of the issue, so that’s a good thing. But in this kind of economy, prez message is also key. Plus if you put a certain type of person in place, you should expect to get predictable results. So that even if Geithner, Summers, etc don’t muck it up now, what makes you think they won’t in the future?

He’s tied to the Enron loophole great the GOP will laugh at his confirmation hearing. The GOP will do anything to obstruct Obama the GOP will bring this up.
They will use it to embarrass Obama. Change or more of the same? Summers connects to Enron and the Clintons the GOP will blame us for the economy.

at this point i’d take a sexist jerk if i thought the guy was competent.

On that I give O the benefit of the doubt. He’s too busy to be curious. Comes with the job.

One of my favorite Qs to ask at the end of a conversation where I’m trying to learn from experts is: Is there a Q I didn’t ask that I should have? But I can imagine that even if O did that, the others would say, Oh no, Mr. Prez. You asked all the right Qs.

i don’t think the GOP will bring it up because they (especially gramm) were all for it too.

bipartisanship. ain’t it grand?

Does Summers’s name keep coming up because Obama or someone on the transition team think they owe him something? Honestly, this is what I don’t like about any kind of cronyism whether in politics or the corporate world.

If cronyism were the controlling feature, Bill Richardson would have been the frontrunner for State. He supported Obama more and earlier than Hillary. I think Obama is choosing the people he does because he likes the way they think.

difficult bubble to break out of. and i’m willing to cut him some slack for the years he was running for office. but there were years when he was teaching or a state legislator – no reason he shouldn’t be able to find a few names of folks to tell him something different, especially about such a critical aspect of governance.

But he didn’t have any direct involvement in macroeconomic issues back then.

I’ve never thought Obama was anything but a moderate centrist, so I assumed his appointments would not be radical.

And a centrist is way better than what we have now.

The upside to appointing Clintonites:

1) people learn from their mistakes;
2) while we hope and expect that the “experts” will anticipate every nuance, a great deal of the failure still rests in the hands of the “regulators” of which there were none on the job.
3) in a time of market uncertainty (that’s an understatement), investors’ minds will be put at ease with known quantities, or if unknown at least they are “brand” names.
4) Obama is still in charge. He has economists on staff who put together his great plan, all of his appointees know the direction in which he’s headed.
5) He must be choosing people who a) will give him other points of view; b) with whom he feels he can get along.

Getting along is 1/2 the battle here. If they melt in a sea of bickering, we really will get lost.

So this is the economic philosophy that turned South America against us, well that and the Death Squads.

Summers as head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers would make more sense since he would be interacting with Obama more. Obama seems to like him even if he does give bad advice.

Better, but good enough? The economy is in such deep trouble, it might not be good enough.

You could say that.

As I said, the kind of things Wash Consensus supported are not going to be relevant at the beginning of O’s regime, but could become important later on.

W, on the other hand, at the G20 meeting, was hot to trot on pushing more of the same.

The GOP over look a way to attack a Dem?

I once asked Summers a Q after he made a presentation at a National Assn of Bus Economists meeting. Think it was when he was Treas Sec but it might have been right before that. He looked at my name tag, used my name in his answer, and gave me a thorough, thoughtful answer to my Q. Impressed me!

But he didn’t have any direct involvement in macroeconomic issues back then.

but he was interested in politics.

he’s a gazillion times smarter than me and he can’t use the google?

if it tars them too, yes. after all they don’t need a real reason – sometimes i think they even prefer to use the made up ones.

Question of time. There’s many things I ask myself on a daily basis that the answers are easily googleable, and I have the time, but don’t get around to it.

Besides, we’re talking about judgement, which is comes from systhesis of deep knowledge of a subject, and that’s not googleable.

1) people learn from their mistakes;

We have just had 8 years of experience that they don’t.

2) while we hope and expect that the “experts” will anticipate every nuance, a great deal of the failure still rests in the hands of the “regulators” of which there were none on the job.

The reason that none were on the job is because the likes of Summers and Rubin removed them during the Clinton Administration.

3) in a time of market uncertainty (that’s an understatement), investors’ minds will be put at ease with known quantities, or if unknown at least they are “brand” names.

It’s not know quantities but real solutions to real problems that are going to in the final analysis re-establish confidence and trust.

4) Obama is still in charge. He has economists on staff who put together his great plan, all of his appointees know the direction in which he’s headed.

He hasn’t shown much of a grasp of economics so how is he going to lead?

5) He must be choosing people who a) will give him other points of view; b) with whom he feels he can get along.

No evidence of a); quite a bit for b)

Was anything decided at the G 20 meet? I thought that was the meeting where nobody shook Bush’s hand?
If Christmas sales are bad what choice will Obama have but to make like FDR?
Public Pressure will be intense to get something done half measures favored by business are not going to cut it.

G20 was only a photo op as near as I can tell.

If Xmas sales suck, which I expect they will, we’ll see what O does then.

Oh, TCU, we have the November employment report due out on Dec 5. If employment drops by much more than the 250,000 of Sept & Oct, that could accelerate another stimulus package.

i’m just going to hope that this report is wrong….

Consider for a moment that L. Summers may be the best mind in Economics alive today, that his comment about women in math and science was intended to challenge researchers to answer the question, using science, for why there are so many more men than women and math and science.

I’d like to hear more by others on some specific incidents that makes you feel like Summers is a mistake.

see my comments @16 ande @19.

Doesn’t the prez have to select the chair (and vice-chair) from among the governors already seated on the board?

I’d like to hear more by others on some specific incidents that makes you feel like Summers is a mistake.

For starters try selise at 16.

Then ask why the hell wasn’t he screaming his head off, like a lot of others, about the sub-prime collapse? I’m very interested in your answer. I’ll be checking back.

The answer to your question about the greater number of men in science is simple, the long history of legalized male supremacy.

If men are smarter than women in math and science, why is it that millions of women score higher on standardized tests in math and science than millions of men? If men are smarter, how do women score as high and higher on MCAT’s and LSAT’s than a lot of men? Larry was too damn stupid to figure that out.

ABC News is also reporting it.

“ABC News has learned that President-elect Obama has decided to name former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers the director of the National Economic Council, essentially the president’s senior economic adviser.”

Nov 22, 1910 wasn’t a photo-op, but it sowed the bad seeds of today’s economic crop.

Summers as Fed chair sounds odd, as I don’t think he’s at all a monetary economist, and I think his government experience has all been on the fiscal side (talk about your lazy non-googlers …). Also, Bernanke has years remaining in his term, and unless he wants out soon an early move to replace him seems unlikely.

One reason (of several) I was glad that Summers did not get the Treasury job again was that earlier this year as the flying apart began in earnest, his every pronouncement sounded to me like alarmed squawking; complicity might do that to a person. But this fall he pulled himself together, based on this testimony before Congress in support of fiscal stimulus. (Thanks, CR) Things being as they are, chairman of a broadbased advisory council I could live with.

For what it’s worth, I find your headline insulting, your tone too strident, and your subject premature. In fact, many of your posts have a pervasively santctimonious and holier-than-thou attitude about them. FWIW.

That would be the least obviously harmful place for him, except that his economic advice sucks. But his foot in mouth disease wouldn’t do much harm there, they would just need to keep him away from the press.

Feel free not to read them then. It’s a big internet, with lots of other writers, I’m sure you can find many who suit your needs.

summers at cea means 1) unlikely stiglitz will be on cea and 2) unlikely obama will be advised to give stiglitz a hearing.

unless stories of their mutual loathing are untrue.