Larry Summers' Brutal Brilliance

[Project Grudge]

'Larry was my boss when I first moved to Harvard, and indeed he really was pretty crucial in persuading me to move. He has a fantastically powerful mind, but he’s also got a fantastically abrasive personality. I really like that, as it was quite a change from the somewhat oleaginous British academic leadership.

As for Larry’s turn in Washington, the administration was facing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. I have no doubt that he was a crucial decision-maker in the administration’s response to that crisis. Whatever one may say about the administration, things could have gone a whole lot worse than they did. We avoided the Great Depression and it was a pretty near-miss. I think the economic team in the White House deserves some credit for that.'

Niall Ferguson


-I was kind of shocked to find this article on The Daily Beast.

[Arctic Dave]

1. Puff piece?

Things could have been worse? No shit. Minimizing the extent of what was fucked up just makes him seem that much more out of touch with the people who were and still are hurting.

Fuck that guy and the horse he rode in on.

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. He's a neoliberal nut. In an interview in the New Statesman, read his

response, below, to a couple of questions put to him by Alyssa McDonald:

"Do you suffer for having been a Thatcherite?"

"I don't think so. My opponents seem to find it very painful to have been on the wrong side of that argument and to have lost. If anything, New Labour went further than the Tories had in unleashing the financial institutions."

That, of course, is a testimony to nothing other than the baneful, horrendous influence of our right-wing noise-machine in the UK, who never ceased to deify Thatcher through the mass media; and to the despicable, slavish fawning on her by the neoliberal turncoats of NuLab(c) who had taken over the Labour Party, initially, under Blair.

Ferguson's excuse for his own intellectual inanition in his appraisal of Thatcher, does nothing to counter it. Indeed, it is all too consistently vacuous.


"Didn't Gordon Brown just take Nigel Lawson's ideas and run with them?"

Ferguson: "This argument that deregulation in the 1980s caused the financial crisis completely ignores that the highly regulated market of the 1970s had a huge crisis, too. The derivatives market is a remarkably recent phenomenon and it really did happen on Labour's watch."

"... ignores that the highly regulated market of the 1970s had a huge crisis, too"?

Not the remotest vestige of a sense of proportion, indeed, of the exercise of an analytical intelligence. If it was intentional, it was deeply dishonest, though I expect the cause was simply his usual deficient aptitude for analysis. "Huge crisis"? So was the
Great Depression, you idiot. And this is set fair to be much, much worse than the Great Depression.

http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2010/07/interview-iran-gaza-concerned

[DCBob]

3. A "nut"??

"Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, was published in November."

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. As Lord Acton once remarked: "There is no error so monstrous that it fails

to find defenders among the ablest men."

For "error", read "errors".

However, instead of reading a catalogue of Ferguson's academic accreditations, why not rebut the points I make:

1) That the economic crisis of the seveties in the UK was "small beer", in comparison with this galloping, global disaster of today.

2) That to disown the shame brought upon his intellectual capacities by his admiration for Thatcher, stating that "Labour" (not New Labour", mark you) was even worse, would have been a poor sort of excuse, even were NuLab(c) not neoliberals, albeit with the elementary savvy to throw a few bones to the populaton.

And that such "arguments" in mitigation, nay, defence, are beyond pitiful.

I'm sure Dr Mengele was highly educated, but he is perhaps the supreme testimony to the fact that the possession of distinguished academic accreditations are anything but a guarantee of the possession in the same individual of even passably sensible assumptions, which alone can prevent his superior education from exaggerating his potential for folly. Indeed, the the collecting of such accreditations, outside of the sphere of medicine - to my mind, bespeaks a "butterfly" intelligence, without depth.

The Tory noise-machine and their puppet-demagogue*, Thatcher, had to build their own railroad for their economic runaway train. Everything takes time. For NuLab(c), it was all a joy-ride, in the knowledge that the people no longer had recourse to a left-wing government, and they now had "carte blanche".

[truedelphi]

10. Thank you for your reasoning on this.

We saw way back in JFK's time that among the brightest and the best were those with the willingness to keep our nation embroiled for decades in the quagmire known as Vietnam. McNamara entered the picture as a Kennedy appointment and he had attended the better East Coast schools.

So too do we now find fellows supporting much ignorant behavior and folly who hale from Yale or Harvard. (Hmm, wasn't George W himself a "Yalie"?)

[girl gone mad]

5. A complete nut job who has consistently been wrong..

throughout the crisis.

[democracy1st]

6. +1

[northernlights]

7. a cracked nut

with the insides missing.

[depakid]

9. He's also one of the "bond vigilantes" who apparently learned nothing from the Great Depression

Want austerity and third world conditions in the United States?

Ferguson's your man.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

8. Niall Ferguson is a fan of Augusto Pinochet.

I read that in one of his books, that I naively bought. I won't tell which because I don't want to give this asshole free advertising.

[marmar]

11. Brilliant my a**.......

His economic theory has proven to be an abject failure, and he's brilliant? ...... The bar has come way down on brilliance, apparently.

[Gabi Hayes]

12. and looky here, has been and is still coming to my local PBS:

http://affiliate.zap2it.com/tv/the-ascent-of-money/EP01109263





from a review of his Pinochet-adoring, neo-lib hommage:

Instead of an inquiring history, what we are left with is a reverential panorama of neoliberal capitalism. Above all, there is little investigation of the losers in the zero-sum game of money's ascent. The only possible cloud Ferguson spies on the future horizon of finance is democratic accountability, with its 'rules and regulations can make previously good traits suddenly disadvantageous'. Quite where the Bear Stearns bail out and bank nationalisation fit into the picture is unclear.

Indeed, much of this book has been overtaken by history and Ferguson looks like being left stranded as the last great hagiographer of hedge funds. As a trailer for the forthcoming TV series (which starts on Channel 4 on 17 November), his bullish stance works well enough, though I would recommend only watching the Panglossian Ferguson, and reading the more considered Jay. Books and television can complement each other - just not always by the same author.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/02/money-niall-ferguson