Economic Collapse

[basserdan]

THE CASE AGAINST SUMMERS —

TNR’s Noam Scheiber: “I understand Obama’s attraction to Summers. Like one of his illustrious predecessors — also a fan of Harvard professors — the president tends to believe that 'You can’t beat brains.' But whatever Summers’ intellectual gifts, he has some dangerous blind spots for a Fed chairman, who must be in constant contact with financial elites and must strain to resist their self-serving pronouncements. Janet Yellen has demonstrated this sort of independent-mindedness. With Summers, it’s at best an open question. If you’re Barack Obama, why would you take that kind of risk with one of the most important appointments of your presidency?”

AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis: “It’s not as if there are no good reasons for … Obama to pick … Summers … Summers is a supersmart economist, for one. … But once you get past those attributes, the pro-Summers case gets rather thin … Boil [it] all … down and the case for Summers really revolves around both Obama and influential Wall Street Democrats being more personally comfortable with Summers — a Treasury secretary during the 1990s boom who later made millions at a hedge fund — than with Yellen, an academic from U-C Berkeley. Summers is a member of the club, Yellen is not.”
http://bit.ly/1aJ7EDj

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LEFT IS NOT HAPPY WITH SUMMERS — HuffPo’s Ryan Grimm and Zach Carter: “Leading Democrats are struggling with the idea that … Obama may actually nominate … Summers t … If he does, he'd pass over … Yellen, who saw the warning signs of the 2008 financial collapse, for Summers, whose deregulatory advocacy as treasury secretary contributed to it. Summers' critics typically cite his role in the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall financial regulations and the 2000 deregulation of the derivatives market as key contributors to the financial collapse of 2008. But Yellen accurately read signs of bank trouble before the crash, when she served as president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve” http://huff.to/13cpFDM

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The Return of Lawrence Summers, Mr. Spectacular Failure
http://www.thenation.com/article/175287/return-lawrence-summers-mr-spectacular-failure#

Fears Rise That Larry Summers Is Likely To Be Named Fed Chairman
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/23/larry-summers-fed-chairman_n_3641737.html

Three reasons why Larry Summers should not be the next Fed chairman
http://qz.com/101443/three-reasons-larry-summers-should-not-be-the-next-federal-reserve-chairman/

I Come to Bury Larry Summers, Not to Praise Him…http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2010/12/larry-summers.html

Wait, Larry Summers Is Now the Favorite for the Fed?
Can we at least talk it over first?
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114009/summers-fed-chairman-bernanke-yellen#

No More Second Chances for Larry Summers
http://www.thenation.com/blog/175420/no-more-second-chances-larry-summers#