Giving Summers enough rope...

Frank Rich of The NY Times has called Larry Summers' performance on last week's Sunday talk shows a disaster, so his column is of course music to my ears. Tone deaf, is the term Rich used. Find the article at NY Times Rich. Here's one quote from Rich that resonates with my earliest anti-Summers blogs:

"The “dirty little secret,” Obama told Leno on Thursday, is that “most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal.” An even dirtier secret is that a prime mover in keeping that stuff legal was Summers, who helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while in the Clinton administration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers underestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply “under extraordinary circumstances.”
Given that Summers worked for a secretive hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, after he was pushed out of Harvard’s presidency at the bubble’s height, you have to wonder how he can now sell the administration’s plan for buying up toxic assets with the help of hedge funds."

So, Frank Rich agrees with me, Janet, Lupi, Bob, and some others, too, who've been emailing and blogging our disgust with Summers. Hopefully, our president will catch on too. I can conjure up a Summers apology speech that would turn me around, though. "I would like to apologise to the American people for my positions taken in the period 1998-2000 regarding regulation (i.e., none is better than any) of the financial markets. In formulating the policy of the Clinton administration, I was most concerned about ....xxxxxx..., which turns out to have been an utterly stupid reason to let the bubble grow. I have decided to give up the practice of economics and become a documentary film maker, focusing on the life of academic economists and their families."
I would forgive old Larry and not mention him again in this blog or in any side emails.