Lawrence Summers

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Summers during the WEF 2007

Lawrence Henry "Larry" Summers (born November 30, 1954 in New Haven , Connecticut ) is an American politician and professor of economics . From 1991 to 1993, Summers was the World Bank's chief economist . In 2009 he was appointed director of the National Economic Council by US President Barack Obama .

family

Summers comes from an influential Jewish academic family. Even his parents were economists: Anita and Robert Summers, both of whom taught as professors at the University of Pennsylvania . He is the nephew of two Nobel Prize winners in economics : Paul Samuelson is his father's brother, Kenneth Arrow is his mother's brother. He spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended Harriton High School.

He is married to the linguist Elisa New and has three daughters.

Academic career

At age 16, Summers went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he originally planned to study physics, but soon switched to economics. After graduation, he went to Harvard University , where he received his Ph.D. made. In 1983, at the age of 28, Summers became one of the youngest full professors in Harvard history. In 1985 he became a research fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ( Sloan Research Fellow ). In 1987 he was a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics .

On July 1, 2001, he became President of Harvard University . On June 30, 2006, Summers stepped down from office because of his remarks about women in science and technology. This made Summers the shortest term of office of Harvard since 1868. His successor was Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust .

Political offices

Lawrence Summers' signature on US $ banknotes

Larry Summers was from 1995 to 1999 as the successor to Frank N. Newman Deputy Treasury Secretary under Robert Rubin and from 1999 to 2001 US Treasury Secretary in the cabinet of Bill Clinton . He was the immediate successor of Robert Rubin. In 2008 it was announced that Summers would be appointed as National Economic Advisor to the administration of US President- elect Barack Obama . For a long time he had been traded for the office of finance minister, which Timothy F. Geithner then took over.

On September 21, 2010, the White House announced that Summers would be stepping down from the National Economic Council at the end of the year to return to Harvard. Summers justified his withdrawal by saying that he had to return to Harvard in January 2011 in order not to lose his position as a full-time university professor. It was said that the move had been planned for a long time.

Political positions

Summers supported the deregulation of the financial markets like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act 1999. This repealed the Glass-Steagall Act on the institutional separation of investment banking and deposit business . In particular, the deregulation of OTC derivatives, contrary to the express advice of Brooksley Born , 1996-1999 head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), was later assessed as a cause of the financial crisis from 2007 onwards . Clinton later publicly regretted listening to Rubin and Summers' advice . But even after the 2008 financial crisis, Summers refused to admit that Brooksley Born was right.

At a research conference of the International Monetary Fund in November 2013, Summers warned of the persistent stagnation that threatened the West after the financial crisis, comparable to the development of the Japanese gross national product between 1993 and 2013. In the coming years, one must think about how an economy should be managed for whom a nominal interest rate of zero is a chronic and systemic barrier to economic activity and holds the economy back below its potential. Summers revived the discussion about a possible " secular stagnation " of the economy and took up a term that goes back to the Keynesian US economist Alvin Hansen of the late 1930s.

criticism

Statements made by Summers in an internal paper of the World Bank that it was economically logical to export pollution, for example in the form of toxic waste, to developing countries, since there the lost income due to increased disease and mortality are lowest, led to criticism. Seen in this way, developing countries are "under-polluted". After this internal paper became public, Summers argued that it had been sarcastic. He caused a stir with his criticism of the Rap CD by Cornel West . A statement on the reasons for the underrepresentation of women in science and technology, according to which it was due to the different availability of skills at the higher end , received negative responses. Summers defended himself against the allegations.

Summers had earned $ 5.3 million while serving as a university professor on a one-day-a-week side job as a consultant for DE Shaw & Company, one of the largest financial investment companies. UCLA's Andrew Sabl asked whether such lucrative ties would not affect Summers' independence as a government advisor .

Wolfgang Streeck considers the $ 2.8 million speaker fees that Summers had collected from Wall Street clients in the crisis year 2008 for bribery .

Others

Awards

Web links

Commons : Lawrence Summers  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. Caren Bohan: Obama taps Geithner, Summers . In: US News , Reuters , November 24, 2008. 
  2. ^ Past Fellows. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, accessed July 22, 2019 .
  3. Obama's LSE alumni , London School of Economics website, accessed March 16, 2015
  4. a b http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/archives/summers.php#conference-info
  5. cf. Who will do what in Washington? ( Memento from December 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) at tagesschau.de, December 1, 2008 (accessed on December 17, 2008)
  6. ^ Summers to Step Down after Midterm Elections
  7. faz.net of September 22, 2010: Obama loses his most important economic advisor
  8. Stephan Schulmeister : The path to prosperity , Ecowin, Munich 2018. P. 120.
  9. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-18/clinton-says-rubin-summers-gave-him-wrong-advice-on-derivatives-rules.html
  10. Stephan Schulmeister: The path to prosperity , Ecowin, Munich 2018. P. 121.
  11. "And that we may well need, in the years ahead, to think about how we manage an economy in which the zero nominal interest rate is a chronic and systemic inhibitor of economic activity holding our economies back below their potential." L. Summers: IMF Fourteenth Annual Research Conference in Honor of Stanley Fischer , Nov. 8, 2013
  12. Mark Schieritz: Fully grown? , Time , December 6, 2013
  13. Larry Summers Remarks, IMF Annual Research Conference, November 8th 2013 (available on the Internet)
  14. Patrick Welter January 9, 2014, faz.net Unfounded fear of stagnation
  15. Hans-Werner Sinn , letter to Carl Christian von Weizsäcker dated January 11, 2014: Letter from Professor Hans-Werner Sinn to Professor Carl-Christian von Weizsäcker as a reaction to the current discussion about secular stagnation.
  16. "Economics and Ethics" in the Association for Social Policy from March 13 to 15, 2003
  17. ^ "Furor on Memo At World Bank," February 7, 1992, The New York Times, accessed January 8, 2019
  18. Archived copy ( Memento of the original from October 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 145 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / media.swarthmore.edu
  19. ^ Louise Story: A Rich Education for Summers (After Harvard) The New York Times, April 5, 2009
  20. “To put it cautiously, one could speak of small gifts to maintain a wonderful friendship. Anyone who loves it more clearly would think of a term such as »anticipatory corruption« under the guise of scientific management consulting. ”( Knowledge as power, power as knowledge: Capital experts in crisis capitalism . Merkur , September 2012, 66th volume, issue 760, p. 776 -787)
  21. Article written by Charles Ferguson by the time of the film's premiere in the United States of America. http://chronicle.com/article/Larry-Summersthe/124790/
predecessor Office successor
Stanley Fischer Chief Economist of the World Bank
1991–1993
Michael Bruno