I have never been a fan of Lawrence “Larry” Summers, Bill Clinton’s last Secretary of the Treasury. It was Larry Summers and his mentor and predecessor, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan who convinced Bill Clinton and congressional Democrats to go along with the financial deregulations proposed by Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), e.g., the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) aka the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 (which partially repealed the firewalls in the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933), and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (which prevented the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating most over-the-counter derivative contracts, including credit default swaps).
Deregulation directly encouraged the casino capitalism of the banksters of Wall Street which nearly destroyed the financial markets and the world’s economy by September 2008.
Larry Summers tried to redeem himself by serving as the Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he was a key economic policy adviser in the Obama administration’s response to the Bush Great Recession.
Larry Summers is now a columnist for the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog, and he has been warning against the Fed raising interest rates, No time for an interest rate hike and Larry Summers: Here’s yet another reason the Fed shouldn’t raise rates, and warning about the next recession on the horizon. Maybe Larry Summers has been chastened by his experiences and now sees the error of his ways, and maybe, just maybe, we should be listening to his warnings.