The Real News Network has the video and transcript for the interview Wall Street Eager to See Larry Summers Nominated Fed Chair.

POLLIN: I think it is. And here’s the reason. Larry Summers was a crucial figure in the late 1990s at the end of the Bill Clinton administration supporting the repeal of the financial regulatory system that we had in place, the Glass-Steagall system that was created in the wake of the 1930s depression, the last massive economic crisis. We did put in place a financial regulatory system that was reasonably effective.

Now, over time, of course, Wall Street and others lobbied against this year after year after year. But it took a Democratic president, a Democratic administration, Clinton, to pass a law to repeal the previous regulatory law. And who was Treasury Secretary of the United States at the time of the repeal of Glass-Steagall? Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

And Larry Summers plays this crucial role. Not only is he a public official, but he is a very well known, sophisticated economist. And on top of that, he had been, in his academic writing, in support of financial regulations. Once he became a public official under Clinton, all of a sudden he became a very aggressive deregulator, such that even the person who was the head of one of the regulatory agencies, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who argued–her name was Brooksley Born–she argued on behalf of regulating derivatives, the most dangerous financial products, and Summers was vehement in opposing it. So, actually, if you had to trace the collapse of the 2007-2009 financial crisis on one person–and, of course, you can’t really trace it to one person–but if you did, I think you could make a fair argument that Larry Summers is more to blame for the financial crisis that we experienced than any other person. So why in the world are we putting him in charge as the government’s top financial regulator to implement these rules that are coming out with Dodd-Frank? Clearly the reason is that Wall Street is fighting like mad to put Larry Summers in so the government will go soft on Wall Street and we still won’t have good financial regulations.

I don’t know how he knows that this is clearly what Wall Street wants, but it wouldn’t be hard to believe.