Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers: "$2,000 checks would be a pretty serious mistake."

[Celerity]

He is not even really for the 600 USD cheques.

Link to tweet

"$2,000 checks would be a pretty serious mistake."

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says larger stimulus checks to Americans could risk overheating the economy

[wryter2000]

1. Okay

Agreed he's an asshole, right?

[Polly Hennessey]

2. He has always been a blustery jerk.

Age is making him worse.

[PSPS]

3. You mean the same "mistake" as all of these other countries?

[Hoyt]

11. Asking because I don't know. Did everyone get $2000 in Canada, or just unemployed?

If everyone got $2000, then our stimulus sucked royally.

If it was only for unemployed, then we paid more with the feds paying $600 week, plus $200 to $300 a week from states. That’s at least as long as it lasted. Not saying that’s enough, or what should be done right now to help people still unemployment or becoming unemployed.

[Disaffected]

22. Probably just unemployed

and under employed due to the pandemic. Certainly not everyone (or mine's lost in the mail somewhere).

[JoeOtterbein]

4. Summers was one of...

...the biggest mistakes ever!

[Wounded Bear]

5. He thinks if we "overheat" the bottom of the economy...

the upper 1% might have their economy cool off.

Or something like that.

[Cracklin Charlie]

21. How can it be a bad idea?

Almost every one of those dollars will go directly into the real economy, not to buy another yacht no one needs. Or a fancy garage full of motor cars that no one drives.

It will go to grocers, landlords, local business, and gas stations. Larry knows this.

[LuvNewcastle]

6. Overheat the economy?

Like it's so fucking hot now that those checks would burn it right up! People are going to pay bills to keep from having their utilities turned off and getting their cars fixed and that kind of thing, not buying superfluous shit. Jeez!

[ismnotwasm]

7. Hopefully everyone knows what a POS he is.

I don’t know what $2000.00 would do to the current economic situation, but I know without help people are going to suffer

[Celerity]

10. I saw on MSNBC earlier that between 5 and 10 million people are facing eviction in the next 90 days

without some sort of direct intervention.

Even adjusting for population that is well over a million people in the UK, or in France, or in Germany. 8 to 16 million or more for Europe as a whole (depending on what you count as Europe).

If that many people were tossed out into the streets en masse over 90 days here, you would have crazy riots and general strikes in the nations, and across the continent, if it was spread out to the entire European populace.

[durablend]

8. Can't have the poor getting all uppity and stuff.

Clearly they need to know their place in society as useless eaters wasting space.

[Journeyman]

9. Yes, whereas throwing money away to cruise lines and airlines and other dying corporations . . .

is a wise and prudent use of the money that could keep people alive and families together.

[TeamPooka]

12. Summers is a fucking asshole who couldn't even run Harvard U

[roamer65]

13. What economy????

If you can’t revive an “economy” with ZIRP, it means that there is little to no economy left.

That is result of massive exportation of industries and labor.

$2000 won’t even generate a blip on economic growth.

[Drahthaardogs]

14. Lol, but more tax cuts for the rich are good

Assholes

[PoliticAverse]

15. A man who managed to rise to his level of incompetance. n/t

[Celerity]

20. Falling Upward: The Surprising Survival of Larry Summers

The surprising survival of a rebranded Larry Summers, who once again is counseling a Democratic presidential candidate

https://prospect.org/economy/falling-upward-larry-summers/

Larry Summers’s public career has been marked by a carnival of policy debacles, punctuated by his brief, accident-prone tenure as president of Harvard. Yet, at 65, he is once again a senior economic adviser to another prospective Democratic president—one who has gingerly embraced transformative policies that Summers has long opposed. Joe Biden and his handlers are aware that Summers is radioactive to much of the Democratic coalition. His campaign has downplayed Summers’s role. In fact, Summers is not only part of Biden’s senior economics policy team, but he is able to end-run other advisers and have one-on-one conversations directly with the former vice president.

Though much has been written about Summers, it’s worth reviewing the dynamics of his influence, serial repositioning, and uncanny survival. The more mistakes Summers makes, the more he is treated as a seer. This is a complex man, with a brilliant mind and nimble political skills. He has powerful patrons and protégés. Perhaps most importantly, his views are very congenial to powerful financial elites, who have a great deal to lose should Joe Biden turn out to be another Franklin Roosevelt. Summers has already held the two top Cabinet jobs on economic policy: Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, and director of the National Economic Council for Barack Obama. The career-capper post that has eluded him twice is Federal Reserve chair. He’s positioning himself through a familiar Summers tactic: wholesale image transformation.

Since exiting government in 2011, Summers has been engaged in a rebranding exercise, positioning himself well to the left of policies he espoused and carried out while he enjoyed actual power. A Summers trademark is never to apologize for mistakes earlier in his career, and to spin the truth to make his actual views sound different from what they were. But the one area where he has neither altered his views, nor claimed different ones, is financial deregulation. Summers, unrepentant, continues to view it as his supreme accomplishment. That alone should give Joe Biden pause. Summers was born into economic royalty. Two of his uncles, Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson, are Nobel laureates, both left of center. His parents, Robert Summers and Anita Arrow Summers, are also economists. His early work on economic theory and practice, which won him a John Bates Clark Medal for the most outstanding economist under age 40, often assessed how markets in practice were not as self-correcting as they are in theory.

But as a young professor at Harvard, while keeping some ties to more moderate economists, Summers attached himself to Martin Feldstein, the campus doyen of free-market advocates. When Milton Friedman died in 2006, Summers gave a gushing eulogy, declaring, “Any honest Democrat will admit that we are all now Friedmanites.” That certainly describes the Summers wing of the Democratic Party. We will soon find out whether it describes Biden. Feldstein, who chaired Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, gave the young Summers a staff job in 1982–1983. In the 1988 presidential campaign, Summers burnished his Democratic credentials by advising Michael Dukakis. In the meantime, having been introduced by a former student working at Goldman Sachs, he had struck up a friendship with Robert Rubin. The two men were taken with each other. Summers was fascinated to watch a master trader at close range, and Rubin admired Summers’s brilliant capacity to rationalize Goldman’s activities as sound economics.

snip

[sprinkleeninow]

25. "We didn't ask for this shit sandwich." No, we certainly did not.

A psychologist was on the other night. She seeing an increase in depression, stress, anxiety, etc. "We weren't meant to live this way" she said.

[JDC]

17. he prefers the economy to be stone cold. Like the little people.

[hatrack]

18. I'll take "Pompous Clueless Assholes Past Their Sell-by Date" For $500, please!

Fuck off, you peck of butt-parsnips.

[Wellstone ruled]

19. Larry,STFU!

You are a Typical New England Snob. Just another Supply Sider pretending to be a liberal. You can not stand to be any where near a Working Man or Women.

[Fiendish Thingy]

23. Take your neoliberal austerity bullshit and shove it up your ass Larry. Nt

[Yavin4]

24. Simple problem to solve. If the economy "overheats", raise taxes on the rich and interest rates.

Problem sovled. Or, am I wrong?

[DFW]

26. I think I know where he got this attitude

I met his mom once in the late 1990s. Very snobby, elite, „my son can do no wrong“ stance. I‘m sure he grew up believing it, too.

I am no economist, but $2000 a month to someone who has zero income and rent to pay, as well as a need to eat on occasion, will not flood the economy of any major western industrialized nation with excess spending power. The Dow will not jump to 35,000 overnight just because fifteen million Americans avoid getting tossed into the street in the middle of the winter. If Summers were one of them, he‘d get the hint pretty quickly, but those are circles in which he will never travel.

[betsuni]

27. Is he the reason I still see people call Democrats "neoliberals"?

[uponit7771]

28. Truly disconnected to think the economy is hot right now or a peak wont avg out over time

[ProfessorGAC]

29. He's Been Wrong Before

Plenty of times and very wrong. This is just another example.
Stiglitz & Krugman routinely disagreed with him on matters, and I trust the judgment of those 2 far, far more.
The only smart thing he ever said was his criticism of 43's deregulation mob with regard to AIG.
Other than that, not so much.