Summers to Be Top White House Economic Adviser at NEC

[cal04]

Source: ABC News

ABC News has learned that President-elect Obama has decided to name former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers the director of the National Economic Council, essentially the president's senior economic adviser.

Part of the Executive Office of the President, the NEC was created for the purpose of advising the President on matters related to U.S. and global economic policy. The NEC has four functions, by executive order: ensuring that programs and policy decisions are consistent with the President's economic goals, monitoring the implementation of the President's economic policy agenda, coordinating policy-making for domestic and international economic issues, and coordinating economic policy advice for the President.

Summers was the 71st Secretary of the Treasury, serving from July 1999 until the end of the Clinton administration in January 2001, having previously served as undersecretary for international affairs and deputy secretary of the Treasury. He also served as chief economist of the World Bank.

At the Treasury Department in the 1990s, Summers worked closely with Tim Geithner, the man Obama intends to nominate to be the next Secretary of the Treasury. The two are said to have an excellent working relationship.

Read more: http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/11/summers-to-be-c.html

[YvonneCa]

1. Wow. I continue to be...

...very positively impressed. :)

[brentspeak]

8. You're "impressed" by a neoliberal clown like Lawrence Summers??

[YvonneCa]

11. I'm impressed that Obama is surrounding himself...

...with many, varied, knowledgeable, outspoken experienced people that won't be 'YES'men like in the Bush Administration. That's what got us into this mess in the first place. JMHO.

[madrchsod]

2. it`s beginning to look like another fdr government

we can nit pick the people he has selected but each one is highly qualified. it looks like we may just have a chance to pull this country out of despair.

[brentspeak]

9. Lawrence Summers is the total opposite of any of FDR's New Deal advisors

Summers was the cretin who phoned up and screamed at the Fed Reserve lawyer who was warning Greenspan and everyone else that the derivatives market needed to be regulated. Summers is one of the Masters Of The Universe who helped enable the worldwide financial collapse in the first place.

[Triana]

13. Yep. . .

It was also Summers who worked in cahoots with Enron and banking lobbyists, and who backed Republican Sen. Phil Gramm's Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned any effective government regulation of the newly unleashed derivatives market. The result was not only a temporary boon to Enron, which soon collapsed under its unbridled greed, but also to the entire Wall Street financial community.

The only opposition from within the Clinton administration came from Brooksley E. Born who, as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, dared defy Summers and Rubin, as well as Greenspan. In frequent appearances before Congress, she warned that the burgeoning derivatives trading "threatens our economy without any federal agency knowing about it." In reward for her prescience, Born, a highly regarded legal expert on derivatives, was treated to scornful attacks from the old boys' network, led (again) by Rubin, Greenspan and Summers, who questioned her competency and insisted it was she who threatened the stability of the market.

That sexism, as well as stupidity and greed, might have played a role in the dismissal of Born's concerns has been raised by some of Summers' critics, who were still smarting even after his subsequent forced departure from Harvard University after disparaging women's innate ability to grasp mathematics and science. "It was Larry Summers who called her up and screamed at her," Amy Siskind, co-founder of the New Agenda, a women's rights group that grew out of the Hilary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, told the Boston Globe to support her view that Summers is a "known misogynist."

Whatever the motives, Born was painfully right in her warnings and Summers was totally wrong in overseeing the passage of legislation that summarily prevented any government regulation of the debt instruments that have proved so disastrous. I don't know if Born, now retired at 68, would be interested in the treasury secretary position, but she is certainly far more qualified than thee other candidates under consideration.
...

MORE:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/18/EDRI1479FT.DTL

[TacticalPeek]

3. Less Larry Summers.

Less Larry Summers, more Gene Sperling, please.

[4lbs]

4. By putting Geithner at the public position of Treasury Secretary and Summers in the more private

role of senior economic adviser, he does two things:

1.) Puts in the public eye someone who Wall Street and many Senators already know. Hence the big rise in the stock market on Friday.

2.) "Shuts" Summers up since he can't talk about anything he discusses with President Obama. Almost no chance of another "girls can't do math" foot-in-mouth statement.

[Triana]

5. Hope you're right SurferBoy. If Summers makes any more idiotic

remarks, maybe they'll only be to Obama, which is bad enough. I KNOW Summers is considered highly qualified and a brilliant economist, but I wish they coulda done without him - but - on the other hand - I can see why they wanted him in there somewhere.

[Psephos]

6. Summers' remarks were not as you and the poster above characterized

but the facts hardly matter when the myth rings with thruthiness.

[stillcool]

7. "Some Democrats say"

yada, yada, yada.

[w4rma]

10. Christ, Obama is turning out to be a full DLCer. Are there any non-DLCers who have Obama's ear? (nt)

[MasonJar]

12. According to another post on DU today, Summers and Geithner work

well together because their styles are complementary. It sounds like a clearly awesome match to me. Read "Why the Geithner Pick Is Even Better Than You Think."