He knows where his bread got buttered.
Lawrence Summers, the chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, collected roughly $5.2 million in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw over the past year and was paid more than $2.7 million in speaking fees from several troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/...
Financial institutions including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form.
That must have been some "visit" to Goldman Sachs. What could have done that would have been worth $135,000, I wonder.
This is the man who is now the president's top economic advisor. Is it any wonder that the administration's policy is to "bailout" wall street by, in effect, buying off its losses, while Detroit has to beg for survival? Is it any wonder that the fundamental market structure that led to the financial collapse is still in place?
And it's not just that Summers has an incestuous relationship with wall street. As treasury secretary to a previous Democratic administration, Summers helped put into place the very policies and lack of oversight that led to the financial debacle.
As Clinton Treasury Secretary from 1999-January 2001 he shaped and pushed the financial deregulation that unleashed the present crisis. He was Treasury Secretary after July 1999 when his boss, Robert Rubin left to become Vice Chairman of Citigroup, where Rubin went on to advance the colossal agenda of deregulated finance directly.
As Treasury Secretary in 1999 Summers played a decisive role in pushing through the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 that was instituted to guard against just the kind of banking abuses taxpayers now are having to bail out. Not only Glass-Steagall repeal. In 2000 Summers backed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that incredibly mandated that financial derivatives, including in energy, could be traded between financial institutions completely without government oversight, ‘Over-the-Counter’ as in where the taxpayer is now being dragged. Credit default Swaps, at the center of the current storm, would not have been possible without Larry Summers and the Commodity Modernization Act of 2000.
http://www.financialsense.com/...
Why is this man within 100 miles of Washington, not to mention serving as the administration's top economic advisor? Is this Alice in Wonderland or what? The sooner Summers is separated from the federal government, the better it will be for the country. He needs to go. Now.