11-04-2009, 03:31 PM
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nap boule
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Join Date: Nov 2005
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Decent piece on Larry Summers... Not sure if this warranted an Official thread or not...
December 2009: William D. Cohan on Larry Summers | vanityfair.com
Quote:
Economy
Endless Summers
Throughout his dazzling but controversial career - top World Bank economist, Treasury secretary, Harvard University president, and now head of the White House National Economic Council - Larry Summers has been his own worst enemy. As friends, colleagues, and Summers himself try to explain his reputation for arrogance, bullying, and insensitivity, the author learns about his more private battles, and why many believe he?s still the M.V.P. in any financial crisis.
By William D. Cohan
December 2009
Larry Summers is not an easy man to catch off guard. Behind his rumpled, jowly, professorial fa?ade hides the world?s shiniest gold-plated r?sum? and one of its fiercest intellects. No less an authority on presidential power than Henry Kissinger once told Tim Geithner, now the Treasury secretary, that Summers should have a permanent job at the White House, solely to sort out for the president - any president - the good ideas on economic policy from the dumb ones.
When Barack Obama was elected, many thought that Summers, who headed Treasury during the final 18 months of the Clinton administration, would find his way back to that post. But inside the Beltway, Summers's connections to New York hedge funds and his rocky tenure as the president of Harvard University, from 2001 to 2006, were of concern, and it was decided that Geithner, Summers's former colleague at Treasury and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (a job he got in 2003 with Summers's help), would be more easily confirmed by the Senate. But since Geithner goes back some 10 years or more with Summers and seems to think five minutes with Summers is worth an hour of most other people's time, there is little evidence that Summers lacks for influence in his current post as director of the White House's National Economic Council.
Wedged into a faded-yellow upholstered wingback chair in his cramped White House office - two short flights of steps above the Oval Office - Summers is not yet, just before noon, in full pontification mode, even though he's been up for hours and is fully caffeinated. His ubiquitous can of Diet Coke is perched an arm?s length away, on the edge of his desk behind his multiple computer screens. Two empties are scattered elsewhere. His kinetic, amped-up energy fills the small room, and, as usual, he has little time for the social niceties. Ask whether the odds favor the Boston Red Sox - in first place in the American League East on July 4 - to make the playoffs this season and he shoots his press attache, Matt Vogel, a withering look. The Great Oz has clearly expected a weightier question - about when the recession will end, or whether health-care reform will pass Congress. Indicating Vogel, he says, "He doesn't know what you're talking about. He doesn't know where this is coming from, I'll bet. You're referring to the teams that are ahead on July 4 normally winning the pennant, even when they have a relatively small margin, like the Red Sox do."
When Summers was a sixth-grader, at Penn Valley School, in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, he spent part of his summer riffling through the microfilmed sports pages of old newspapers and magazines dating back to 1930, in order to determine if there was any correlation between where a team was in the standings on Independence Day and whether that team eventually made the playoffs. His parents - Robert and Anita, then economics professors at, respectively, the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College - had encouraged him in his quirky mission and helped him calculate the odds. As the Vietnam War was heating up in October 1965, the Philadelphia Bulletin described Summers as "the most qualified 11-year-old odds maker" in baseball...
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