With all the attention on Larry Summers’ possible appointment as the Fed Chief (he has now withdrawn his name) I thought I’d post a little info on him.
A while ago Ron Unz reported,
“[Summers] seems to have played a major role in transmuting Harvard from a renowned university to an aggressive hedge fund, policies that subsequently brought my beloved alma mater to the very brink of bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis. Under his presidency, Harvard paid out $26 million dollars to help settle international insider-trading charges against Andrei Shleifer, one of his closest personal friends, who avoided prison as a consequence. And after such stellar financial and ethical achievements, he was naturally appointed as one of President Obama’s top economic advisors, a position from which he strongly supported the massive bailout of Wall Street and the rest of our elite financial services sector, while ignoring Main Street suffering. Perhaps coincidentally, wealthy hedge funds had paid him many millions of dollars for providing a few hours a week of part-time consulting advice during the twelve months prior to his appointment.”
In June, Summers rebuked Stephen Hawking for joining the international boycott against Israel. Israeli President Shimon Peres is Summers’ “a life-long friend” When he was president of Harvard, Summers told students and faculty that calls for the University to divest from Israel and a Harvard student group’s fundraising activities were “anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent.”
I haven’t had time to read the following articles yet, but to see articles on a conservative website that mention Summers go here. To see the defense of Summers’ in the Boston Globe, see “Summers, Harvard, and Israel,” by Alex Beam. (article now deleted)