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Posted: Thu 20:46, 26 Sep 2013 Post subject: s NYT about Larry Summers’ |
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deeply enough (at least back then) about the possibility that markets weren’t efficient, that economic players had their own biases and irrational behaviors, and that finance thus needed tighter regulation.Summers himself would, not surprisingly,[url=http://www.tinfoti.com]Cheap Christian Louboutin[/url], disagree. “Ok, maybe there’s some charitable recollection here on my part,[url=http://www.tinfoti.com]Christian Louboutin Men[/url],” he admitted during one panel in which he was asked what had changed in his economic thinking over the last ten years. “But I’ve always been interested in behavioral finance.” What he did concede was that his belief that simply growing the economic pie would mean growing middle class incomes had turned out to be wrong. “Inequity has risen in the last decade, and it will continue to rise,” said Summers,http://www.tinfoti.com, echoing what many at the conference see as the biggest challenge to the global economic order.Of course, one of the other big questions was what, if anything, Summers would have done differently in terms of regulating the banking system. The answer – not much. “I’ve been more cautious than many about constraining financial innovation,” he said, adding that he didn’t believe the financial crisis had its roots in “new-fangled financial instruments” but rather in a simple real estate bubble. Hmmm—tell that to Iceland. One thing Summers said that most of the crowd could agree with is that “anger and dissatisfaction with the financial system doesn’t constitute a [coherent regulatory] policy.” That, three years on from the crisis, we’re still waiting for.Larry Summers’s hedge fund daysLouise Story has a story in today’s NYT about Larry Summers’s two years at hedge fund giant D.E. Shaw. The topic of what the heck Larry was doing at Shaw came up in this blog not long after he joined. After initially mocking him, I eventually came around to the idea that he might be there for more than just window dressing. By Story’s account there was definitely some window dressing—meetings with clients, speeches, etc.—but also actual investing work.At Shaw, Mr. Summers, the professor, was often the student. The arrogant personal style that turned off some Harvard colleagues seemed to evaporate, Shaw traders say. Mr. Summers immersed himself in dynamic hedging, Libor rates and other financial arcana. …“We could call or e-mail him anytime,” a former Shaw trader said. “He always asked me more questions than I could ask him. He would dig through my entire way of thinking.”Last September, Mr. Summers explained to Shaw traders what appeared to be an aberration in a key interest rate, the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, thus helping its traders avoid losses.I’m thrilled that the top economic adviser to President Obama knows more about dynamic hedging than he used to. But there are two bits of information in the article that, when put together, kind of bothered me:1) Summers worked one day a week for D.E. Shaw2) He made $5.2 million there last yearAt the time he went to work at D.E. Shaw, Summers had largely given up on the idea of ever occupying a high-level government post again (too controversial). And he wasn’t doing lobbying work for the firm (he’d be a pretty bad lobbyist). So I don’t think there’s anything directly corrupt about this. But it does demonstrate Wall Street’s potential for corrupting political discourse. There just haven’t been any other parts of our economy (that I know of, at least), where a guy like Larry Summers could make $5.2 million a year for working one day a week. It’s sort of like the way foreign aid sometimes terribly skews economic incentives in really poor countries—because the amounts of money being thrown around by aid agencies dwarf what can be made in the domestic economy.Larry Summers, fruit flyHoley moley. I missed this when economist Willem Buiter posted it on his FT.com blog a few days ago. He says the front-runners for the Fed chairmanship when it comes open next year are incumbent Ben Bernanke, SF Fed President Janet Yellen and Larry Summers,[url=http://www.tinfoti.com]Christian Louboutin Outlet[/url], then writes
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