Friday, September 06, 2013

If Obama picks Summers he's a damn fool

And he will deserve any grief he gets over it from liberal Democrats.

The Financial Times has an article today about what appears to be the increasing likelihood of Obama picking Larry Summers for Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The article begins:
In March 2000, Lawrence Summers was due to speak to a conference of derivatives traders in Boca Raton, Florida, and tell them how government regulators should have a limited role in protecting and supervising the financial system. 
“Let me be clear, it is the private sector, not the public sector, that is in the best position to provide effective supervision,” according to the text of the then Treasury Secretary’s speech. “Counterparties and creditors have more knowledge of their counterparts, more skill in evaluating risk and greater incentives than any public regulator will ever have.”
Summers appears to have changed his tune somewhat about financial regulation, but according to the article, he's still pretty weak in many areas.

And what the Financial Times doesn't care about - and in fact it's rarely mentioned in articles about Summers' candidacy, is how much animosity Summers garnered by his "women are just not as good at math and science as men" speech when he was president of Harvard

Summers was tutored in this standard claim of evolutionary psychology by that idiot Steven Pinker, leading proponent of evolutionary psychology and friend of racists Razib Khan and Steve Sailer.

My first introduction to Larry Summers was his infamous Harvard speech. It was only much later that I realized how responsible he was, along with Greenspan and Robert Rubin, for the deregulation, especially of derivatives, that contributed to the financial meltdown of 2008, thanks to the Frontline show The Warning and the stellar documentary Inside Job.

Summers doesn't deserve to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve for that reason. But for many women it's his blatant sexism that galls the most. Just as many people know the late Christopher Hitchens primarily as the guy who said "women aren't funny", many people know Larry Summers as the guy who said women aren't as smart as men.

Obama would be a damn fool to give Summers the job. The inside job.

UPDATE: What Joseph Stiglitz said in the NYTimes.