Obama to begin new series of economic addresses

[matthews]

19. NOTHING good has ever come from anything old Larry has ever touched.

Ask Harvard.

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It happened at least once a year, every year. In a roomful of a dozen Harvard University financial officials, Jack Meyer, the hugely successful head of Harvard’s endowment, and Lawrence Summers, then the school’s president, would face off in a heated debate. The topic: cash and how the university was managing - or mismanaging - its basic operating funds.

Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members.

“Mohamed was having a heart attack,’’ said one former financial executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering Harvard and Summers. He considered the cash investment a “doubling up’’ of the university’s investment risk.

But the warnings fell on deaf ears, under Summers’s regime and beyond. And when the market crashed in the fall of 2008, Harvard would pay dearly, as $1.8 billion in cash simply vanished. Indeed, it is still paying, in the form of tighter budgets, deferred expansion plans, and big interest payments on bonds issued to cover the losses.http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/11/29/harvard_ignored_warnings_about_investments/



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Let’s go through the last 15-20 years of perfect, brilliant top economist Larry Summers’ career: He joined Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan in their successful attempt to tear down long-standing financial regulations and keep derivatives totally unmonitored as a Treasury official and then secretary during the Clinton administration, directly leading to the 2008 financial collapse; he became President of Harvard, where he was a total failure who was eventually kicked out; he made $20+ million giving bad advice and speeches to gullible financial firms; he returned to government to head President Obama’s economic team, where he was overbearing, crude to his colleagues, and incorrect about the depth and severity of the Great Recession; and then he went back to his plum sinecure at Harvard, where everyone hopes he will stay, quietly, forever. But oh, what’s that, the World Bank is in need of a new president? And who is at the top of the list?

http://wonkette.com/463861/rude-failure-larry-summers-a-leading-candidate-for-another-top-job

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The Return of Lawrence Summers, Mr. Spectacular Failure

The guy who tops the list of those responsible for sabotaging the world’s economy is lobbying to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Robert Scheer
July 16, 2013
This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).
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Tell me it’s a sick joke: Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, the guy who tops the list of those responsible for sabotaging the world’s economy, is lobbying to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. But no, it makes perfect sense, since Summers has long succeeded spectacularly by failing.


Why should his miserable record in the Clinton and Obama administrations hold him back from future disastrous adventures at our expense? With Ben Bernanke set to step down in January, and Obama still in deep denial over the pain and damage his former top economic adviser Summers brought to tens of millions of Americans, this darling of Wall Street has yet another shot to savage the economy.

Summers was one of the key players during the Clinton years in creating the mortgage derivative bubble that ended up costing tens of millions of Americans their homes and life savings. This is the genius who, as Clinton’s Treasury secretary, supported the banking lobby’s successful effort to make the sale of unregulated bundles of mortgage securities and the phony insurance swaps that backed them perfectly legal and totally unmonitored. Those are the toxic bundles that the Federal Reserve is still unloading from the banks at a cost of trillions of dollars.


Summers had condemned Glass-Steagall as an example of “archaic financial restrictions” and called instead for “allowing common ownership of banking, securities and insurance firms.” A decade later, while in the Obama administration, Summers worked to prevent a return to the Glass-Steagall prohibition in the Dodd-Frank legislation.

http://www.thenation.com/article/175287/return-lawrence-summers-mr-spectacular-failure#