As we wait for financial regulation reform to make its way through its final legislative hurdles, it’s a good time to step back and consider questions like how we got here and where we’re going. For this, consider checking out John He’s indispensable primer on the ideological backgrounds of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, the two men most responsible for Wall Street’s future. The article was published in the Harvard Political Review’s Online Only Section today.
On Larry Summers:
Hailed as a wunderkind since his college days, Lawrence Summers is widely considered a brilliant economist and a skilled policy-maker. Yet his ideological position is tough to pin down. Obama has characterized him as a “champion of the middle class”; in 2007, he remarked to the New York Times, “I think the defining issue of our time is: Does the economic, social and political system work for the middle class? Because the system’s viability, its staying power and its health depend on how well it works for the middle class.” Yet those familiar with Summer’s tenure in the Clinton administration invariably point to his affinity for protecting Wall Street’s interests. In the Treasury Department in the late nineties, Summers led the opposition to federal management of risky trading instruments; he wrote that the recommendation for increased government regulation “has cast the shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an otherwise thriving market-raising risks for the stability and competitiveness of American derivative trading.” His statements are indicative of the philosophy that reigned in the nineties, the era which bred Geithner’s outlook too.
Read the full article here: http://harvardpolitics.com/online-only/reform-ideology/