November 07, 2008 Missing the Stock Bubble and Housing Bubble Makes You Qualified to Fix the Crisis
I have nothing against Larry Summers, but I think there is some sense to having people evaluated based on their job performance. Larry Summers thought the stock bubble was cool, ignored the housing bubble, was in favor of the over-valued dollar and gave warmly supported financial deregulation. This track record arguably make Summers one of the main villains in the current economic crisis. So why does the LA Times tell us that we need his wisdom to fix the situation? I have no doubt that Summers is very bright, but his brilliance did not prevent him from supporting the policies that got us into this mess. Why do we think that his brilliance will lead him to choose the best policies to get us out of it? --Dean Baker November 05, 2008 Andrea Mitchell Hasn't Heard About the Financial Crisis I usually don't watch much television news. When I do, I realize why. I saw Andrea Mitchell tonight talking about who President Obama will turn to for help in dealing with the financial crisis. The first two names were at the top of the list of people who gave us the financial crisis: Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. This would be a bit like turning to Osama Bin Laden for aid in the war on terrorism. Rubin and Summers were both major advocates of the one-sided deregulation of the financial industry under which we maintained the security blanket of "too big to fail" for the Wall Street big boys, but gave them the green light to take whatever risks they wanted in order to enrich themselves. It would be difficult to imagine that President Obama would embrace people with such a dismal track record. --Dean Baker -- Jim Devine / "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
