Further confirms my notions of Larry Summers being the biggest piece of shit in Obama's administration. It's like every behind the scenes story has that guy trying to reign in Obama and shilling for wall street and corporations.
That isn't my impression of Larry Summers from reading about him. Most of the views he's currently espousing are almost indistinguishable from a conventional Keynesian position. The following excerpt (
from a Reuters article about secular stagnation) is so thoroughly committed to the idea of monetary and fiscal stimulus that it probably could have been written by Krugman. According to Summers:
The third approach and the one that holds the most promise is a sustained commitment of policy to raising the level of demand at any given level of interest rates through policies that restore a situation where reasonable growth and reasonable interest rates can coincide. To start, this means ending the disastrous trends towards less and less government spending and employment each year, and taking advantage of the current period of economic slack to renew and build out our infrastructure. In all likelihood, if the government had invested more over the last 5 years, our debt burden relative to income would be lower today given the way in which economic slack has hurt the economys long-run potential, so it would not have imposed any burden on future taxpayers.
Raising demand also means seeking to spur private spending. There is much that can be done in the energy sector to unleash private investment on both the fossil fuel and renewable sides. Regulation that requires the more rapid replacement of coal-fired power plants will increase investment and spur growth as well as help the environment. And it is essential to insure in a troubled global economy that a widening trade deficit does not excessively divert demand from the U.S. economy.
I think people on the left have become accustomed to projecting some of their frustration onto Summers for the administration's failure to live up to their idealism. Summers is an easy target because he's abrasive and his actions are easily misconstrued. But a shill he most definitely is not. Despite his conservative position on net neutrality, Summers was out in front of the administration on the issue of jobs, health care, and the auto industry,
according to Jonathan Cohn.