New Blog: “Economists for Firing Larry Summers”
While many people seem to be agitating for Turbo Timmy’s dismissal, an underground drumbeat has begun calling for Summer’s head:
How can you not find some appreciation for a blog that is devoted to helping a man spend more time with his loved ones?
Economists for Firing Larry Summers:
This blog is devoted to seeing to it that Larry Summers gets to spend more time with his family.
-Thorstein Veblen
Brilliant!
Here’s a quick excerpt:
This from Vanity Fair:
Summers has plenty of other things figured out as well, including the origins of the current financial crisis, for which he has crafted a cogent explanation worthy of his reputation as a policy wonk and his days as a college debating champion at M.I.T. “I think crises like this get made by multiple cascading misjudgments,” he explains, and then catalogues them: too much government spending, not enough private-sector saving, too much dependence on foreign debt, too much demand for “riskless” financial instruments that weren’t, in fact, riskless …
The first three of these were, at best, only tangentially related. As much as I think the Bush tax cuts were a mistake, Republican inability to balance the budget really did not have anything to do with the crisis. Ditto for Private-sector saving (even though i think saving is good, generally…) Dependence on foreign debt had nothing to do with the crisis.
November 24th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Unemployment
by Lawrence H. Summers
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Unemployment.html
November 24th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I agree that Geithner and Summers should resign or be fired. If Obama does not make sure these two are out of office soon, he may very well turn out to be yet another feckless president, incapable or unwilling to make courageous decisions and be a true leader.
November 24th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Can you imagine this sort of talk while we’re at war? It’s unpatriotic.
Go ahead and embolden the enemy with your anti-American talk.
November 24th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
where’s the “Bankers for firing Geithner” blog or the “Monetarists for firing Bernanke” blog?
November 24th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Just watch— in a truly bold, daring move they’ll bring in Bob Rubin.
November 24th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
This is a sad commentary on the blogger world Barry.
You know so much of this kind of thing is ideologically based.
November 24th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
What possible good could firing Larry Summers do? Sounds like a bit of jealousy from his fellows in the society of knights that say “nit” or whatever the gibberish de jour is.
I’m an anarcho-capitalist. Burn it all down, and completely destroy the econo-bureaucracy. But first we need a Great Leap Forward. Send all the economists to the fields to make sawgrass into ethanol, by hand, so that they’ll leave us alone to create a better world for ourselves.
November 24th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Those guys, least of all Summers arent going anywhere…Obama is escalating an unwinnable war, has done an about face on every campaign promise and received a remarkable lack of heat at any level—it will take a hell of lot more than a blog (as good as it may be) to fuel that fire.
Damn…
November 24th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Well Well well… So we really are going to hell in a handbasket, what’s interesting is it’s going to be a nice gentle descent, so we can read all the writing on the walls. As we descend the writing gets far more difficult to read, but only because it will be written by increasingly ignorant idealogues, until finally at the bottom with a gentle bump we can all climb out of the basket and look around for a while before we finally and ultimately get owned.
November 24th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
What possible good could firing Larry Summers do?
It would demonstrate that individuals with obvious conflicts of interest would not be permitted to serve at the highest levels of government. Neither Geithner nor Summers can be trusted to provided the President or Congress with objective advice given their previous work histories and relationships. Replacing Geithner with Dimon may be even worse given his position of TBTF.
It might boil down to is there anyone who can be trusted to rise above a self-serving agenda and do what is in the best interests of the nation and the general public in this day and age?
Volcker, Bair….. and beyond the philosophical differences folks might have with him, Bernanke. Who else?
November 24th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I’m looking for a blog devoted to “Non-Economists/Monetarists/Bankers for Firing the Whole Freaking Lot of ‘Em!”
November 24th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
John Snow
John Snow
John Snow
John Snow
John Snow
Paul O’Neil
Paul O’Neil
Paul O’Neil
Is Larry Summers worse than either of these two?
November 24th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
ECONOMISTS FOR FIRING LARRY SUMMERS – 27
ECONOMISTS FOR HANGING LARRY SUMMERS – 3,942
Best regards,
Econolicious
November 24th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
How but it. We live in truly a new world when views antipathetic to the standing powers can be published and promoted to a very wide audience at only the cost of achieving a certain level of credibility and appeal.
This is in great contrast to the expense and effort required via traditional media. Here money or power are the prerequisites.
November 24th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Mike S,
Merely being not worse is unacceptable. The current situation needs people who are leaders, not just people who are tolerable at best.
November 24th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Considering the state of the reliability of “economists” (errrr political economists) this is exactly what not to do.
November 24th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Maybe I missed the coup, but last time I checked, Obama was still the President.
We have the right to dismiss the President by calling for impeachment, but blaming underlings for presidential behavior is silly. If Barak wants to dismiss “little Timmy” to cover his ass…fine, but I’m still holding the cocky dude in the oval office responsible.
In every area that he has focused this administration, Obama has created future disaster.
Obama is Bush’s third term…we’ve seen this movie before, the original sucked, why do we want to pay for a sequel?
November 24th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
John Snow knows nothing.
November 25th, 2009 at 8:08 am
O’Neil or how about Dave Walker also.
Great read, now we need blogs to get rid of the other absolute moron’s: Geithner, Bernanke, Romer ……
November 25th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Geithner and/or Summers ousted?
Ha, ha, good luck with that fellas.
You guys just crack me up!!