In his book “The Escape Artists,” Noam Scheiber portrayed Summers as a force for restraint in the 2009 stimulus debates. That too cost him \u2014 unfairly \u2014 some liberal support. It now seems clear that he was a strong advocate of expansionist policies, though with tactical reservations that muddied the view from outside. On the other hand, there were esoteric matters relating to the bailouts \u2014 the Summers-Timothy Geithner toxic-assets plan for the big banks, for example \u2014 that might have brought deserved criticism had they been better understood.
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\nSo the battle was symbolic, a fight of outsiders against insiders, of Wall Street allies against regulators, prosecutors, women and populists.<\/p>\n
Neither Summers nor Yellen played any visible role in it; they appeared as observers, while the battle blew around them. For my part, not least since my views don’t matter, I ducked a few invitations to join in. This was partly personal: My rare exchanges with Summers have been cordial, and I owe him for acts of grace in 2006, at the end of his Harvard presidency, when my father died.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
By the time I step in here I am commenting on Dan Kervick’s comments on James Galbraith’s comments on Noam Scheiber.\u00a0 This might be a little like the telephone game (or gossip game), where you whisper something into the ear of one person in a long line, and that person whispers it to the next.\u00a0 When the item gets told out loud by the last person in line, it has limited resemblance to what went it.<\/p>\n
Do you want to join the line?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I guess I am playing a role in the meta-analysis of other people’s analyses of the Larry Summers saga. New Economics Perspectives has the post Galbraith\u2019s Post-Mortem on the Summers Drama by Dan Kervick. Is Summers history\u2019s greatest monster? No. But he had his shot on the historical stage. He put his large, assertive stamp […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-stevegsposts","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14537"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14538,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14537\/revisions\/14538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}