Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Larry Summers Testifying Before the Senate Budget Committee, June 4, 2013
Yesterday Larry Summers penned an opinion piece for the Washington Post, lecturing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a Presidential candidate, on what Sanders should actually be saying in his own op-eds about reforming the Federal Reserve.
No one will ever accuse Larry Summers of being short on arrogance. After promising the American people in 1999, as Treasury Secretary in the Bill Clinton administration, that pushing through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act would be “the right framework for America’s future financial system,” then watching that system collapse as a result of that repeal just nine years later in the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression, one would think Summers would find some obscure hole in academia and crawl into it.
Instead, Summers went on to become President of Harvard where, in 2005, he suggested at an economics conference that women might lack an innate aptitude for math and science, serving up a potential explanation for women’s low numbers as scientists at elite universities. This produced world-wide notoriety for Summers and a vote of no-confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. A year later, facing a likely second no-confidence vote from the same body, Summers resigned his post as President of Harvard.
In an article explaining his resignation at Harvard, the New York Times wrote that Summers “alienated professors with a personal style that many saw as bullying and arrogant,” adding that he had created “the intense ill will and even loathing toward him within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university’s largest unit.”
With that heady reference in his vitae, President Obama decided in 2013 that Summers was ready to assume the second most important post in the U.S. government as Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors – a post requiring consensus and respect for the views of fellow members of the Federal Open Market Committee.
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