Winter Is Coming For Summers

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again.” – Henry Ford

Larry Summers now finds himself under scrutiny for his long relationship with the world’s most notorious sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.

Today, he resigned from the board of artificial intelligence pioneer, OpenAI. On Monday, he apologized and said he would step back from public commitments. He also said he would continue teaching at Harvard University, even as the Ivy League icon has launched an internal investigation.

As the former Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton and an economic advisor to President Barack Obama, Summers is going to be a prime punching bag for Donald Trump – whose name appears most in the most recent Epstein email dump. The president has already stumped for the Department of Justice to investigate Summers.

For too many years, Democrats have disregarded Summers’ buffoonery, which he has carried on in plain site. Now it’s a hurdle on their path to claim a moral high ground. And it’s time to take out the trash.

In 2013, Summers was on the short list to replace Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve despite a staggering slew of blunders.

At the time, I was writing a Business Blunders-themed column for The Wall Street Journal. Those with a WSJ subscription can still find it online.

Read More: Larry Summers ‘Failing Up’ to the Fed: Mess Up at One Job, Get a Better One (The Wall Street Journal, Al Lewis)

I’m not taking a victory lap here because there is no victory.

I’d just like to express how incredible it seems that I’ve spent so much time highlighting the financial follies of our times, and how few people care in their incessant awe of wealth, power, influence.

Here are a few paragraphs from my 2013 WSJ piece:

“If you saw the movie ‘The Social Network,’ you saw a portrayal of the Winklevoss twins complaining to Harvard President Larry Summers that some twerp named Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook.

“Mr. Summers shooed them away, not recognizing the value of the website, which turned out to be worth billions …

“In 2006, Mr. Summers resigned as Harvard’s president following a faculty no-confidence vote. He’d sparked one controversy after the next, the least of which was suggesting that women didn’t have the aptitude for math and science.

“He also supported a Harvard professor who bought Russian stocks while designing Russia’s privatization plans – a scandal that led to Harvard paying $26.5 million to settle a False Claims Act lawsuit. Then he lost Harvard about $1 billion by investing its money in derivatives – instruments he wanted to keep deregulated during his days in the Clinton administration.

“Another movie that involves Mr. Summers – the 2010 documentary ‘Inside Job’ –portrays him as a key villain in the 2008 financial collapse.

That’s some resume, yet Summers continued to rank among the nation’s most influential economists – at least to the willfully blind.

He went on teaching at Harvard, giving speeches at the International Monetary Fund, serving on boards, publishing books and papers, and now we’ve learned, he’s been carrying on with Epstein all the while.

He’s been chatting with Epstein all the way up to 2019 when the global sex-trafficking magnate was arrested a second time and ended up mysteriously dead in his prison cell.

As Business Blunders noted last week:

“Jeffrey Epstein had been a registered sex offender since 2008. Anyone maintaining a ‘professional relationship’ with him after that date has explaining to do.

Read More: Networking With A Pedophile (Business Blunders)

It’s that simple. And indeed Summers has a lot of explaining to do after an email dump that shows him asking Epstein for dating advice amid other chummy exchanges.

The emails don’t implicate Summers in any wrongdoing, but most embarrassingly Epstein calls himself Summers’ “wing man” in one thread.

Quite suddenly aghast, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is calling for Harvard to cut ties with Summers.

“If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.”

Warren is a former Harvard Law professor.

She opposed Summers for the Fed in 2013. She didn’t like his “Wall Street vs. Main Street views, or his networking with the world’s rich and powerful. But she never publicly weighed in on his many Harvard controversies – until now.

A generous interpretation is that Summers valued Epstein as a connection to wealthy donors and influencers. He raised money for Harvard and other causes and needed an Epstein edge.

What’s sad is a bipartisan culture that ignores such buffoonery until it becomes painfully obvious.

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