Summers Quits as Possible New Fed Chairman

Former Harvard President and Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers has withdrawn from consideration to become the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He telephoned President Obama about his decision to withdraw.
 

http://news.yahoo.com/-summers-pulls-out-of-fight-for-federal-reserve-chair-222610669.html

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There’s a long article Michael Hirsh wrote September 12th in the National Journal called "The Case Against Larry Summers.". It says:
"Summers has made a lot of errors in the past 20 years, despite the eminence of his research. As a government official, he helped author a series of ultimately disastrous or wrongheaded policies, from his big deregulatory moves as a Clinton administration apparatchik to his too-tepid response to the Great Recession as Obama's chief economic adviser. Summers pushed a stimulus that was too meek, and, along with his chief ally, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he helped to ensure that millions of desperate mortgage-holders would stay underwater by failing to support a "cramdown" that would have allowed federal bankruptcy judges to have banks reduce mortgage balances, cut interest rates, and lengthen the terms of loans. At the same time, he supported every bailout of financial firms. All of this has left the economy still in the doldrums, five years after Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse, and hurt the middle class. Yet in no instance has Summers ever been known to publicly acknowledge a mistake." Much more at:

http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-case-against-larry-summers-20130912
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Comment by the Blog Author
Summers also supported leaving derivatives without any regulation at all and keeping most of them off exchanges (which have rules about the issues traded upon them). He supported the repeal of Glass-Steagal. He supported the decisions of his mentor and predecessor at Treasury, Robert Rubin.

Summers was right to withdraw from consideration to be the next Fed chief – he was part of the problem that created the Great Recession.