STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 1 March 2012

[Demeter]

44. Larry Summers For World Bank: So Much Wrong, So Little Time

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-gongloff/post_3060_b_1310577.html

What exactly does Larry Summers have to do to stop being offered important jobs? Hold up a liquor store? Kill a guy?

....Even if you give Summers a pass on his bad advice to the president, there are plenty of other reasons to oppose his nomination to the World Bank. His interpersonal skills fall somewhere on the scale between honey badger and Yosemite Sam with a urinary tract infection. He has a paleolithic attitude about women. As a World Bank economist, he once signed off on a memo that suggested, apparently in a Swiftian way, dumping toxic waste in poor countries.

And his aversion to floating a bigger stimulus package fits into a pattern of behavior that stretches back to his time in the Clinton administration, when he warned against going too far with financial regulation.

He supported the end of the Glass-Steagall act, which had kept commercial and investment banks successfully separated for decades after the Great Depression. In fact, he still supports the idea of super-size, do-everything banks, he recently told the BBC's Channel 4....

...by rewarding Summers with a plum posting at the World Bank, President Obama would be sending a signal that the Larry Summers Way -- of thinking small despite your apparent brilliance, of not trying to upset the powers that be, whether that be the banking industry or the bond market, or the president -- is a fine way to run an organization. That would demonstrate either that President Obama has not learned much at all from the past decade -- or that he is fully on board with the Larry Summers Way. Neither message would be very encouraging.