Voices
a collective delusion that gripped
the polity: Housing prices can never fall. This became the underpinning for an economic tragedy from
which tens of millions of Americans have yet to escape.
“It’s like dealing with a professor
of a complex subject that you’re
supposed to know something
about,” the former chairman of the
Securities and Exchange Commission, Arthur Levitt, said of Greenspan when we talked in the fall of
2008. “I always felt that the titans
of our legislature didn’t want to
reveal their own inability to understand some of the concepts that
Mr. Greenspan was setting forth. I
don’t recall anyone saying, ‘What
do you mean by that, Alan?’”
Now imagine what happens in
response to a similar question:
What do you mean by that, Larry?
The result is likely to be an
impatient lecture rather than an
exchange of thinking that might
improve policy by injecting alternate views into the conversation.
Summers possesses the same sort
of supreme assuredness that rendered Greenspan impervious to
competing perspectives, plus another trait that may be even more
disturbing in a Fed chairman: He
is a bully. He cannot help but run
PETER S.
GOODMAN
HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
over people who hold positions
counter to his own (especially if
said people are women).
His clashes with female professors at Harvard are legendary.
More recently, Summers squelched
Christina Romer, his White House
economic team colleague, as she
sought a larger dose of stimulus
spending than he deemed wise.
Back in the late 1990s, Sum-
[Summers] speaks
in PowerPoint sentences,
with the sort of authority
and sweep that a president
needing to make a tough
decision must crave.”
mers ran over Brooksley Born,
then head of the Commodity and
Futures Trading Commission,
when she presciently sought to
use her agency’s authority to regulate derivatives. He personally
called her and hollered at her, according to Born’s commission colleague, Micha V