Larry Summers

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/27/summers_for_fed_chair_no_way.html

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"Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile." (Vince Lombardi)

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A good friend sent me a blog post from "Slate" about Larry Summers and how he's being pushed as a replacement for Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Bernanke did not attend the annual Fed meeting in Jackson Hole this year which is considered a sign that he might be leaving.

If Bernanke is leaving, that would be a shame. He's done everything he could to put "liquidity" back into the U.S. system since the worldwide recession and has connected that to the unemployment rate: basically, he won't let up until the U.S. unemployment rate drops to 6.5%. That's never been done before and it shows a certain social awareness that more people in government ought to have.

On to Larry Summers: this is a guy that got fired when he was president of Harvard! That's hard to do. So, how did he achieve that lowly distinction? Let me quote the blog post: "...the guy who said women don't succeed in academia because math is too hard for them..."

Really.

Yet, President Obama saw fit to appoint him guru of economic matters in an effort to respond to the worldwide economic crisis. Obama was rewarded, in that case, with Summers' great quote that "...there's no adult in charge." I'm sure that President Obama likes to think of himself as an "adult."

Janet Yellen is vice chairwomen of the Federal Reserve and the next in line. If we don't like that, then Christina Romer is a good choice for many reasons, not the least of which is that she pretty much disagreed with Larry Summers on everything when she was part of the administration's economic team.

So, let's have anybody but Larry Summers.