larry summers

For Tim Geithner, it’s been a difficult week.
“Conservatives agree that as point person, you failed,” Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) told the Treasury secretary yesterday during a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee. “Liberals are growing in that consensus as well. Poll after poll shows that the American public has lost confidence in this president’s ability [...]

No surprise that President Obama’s top economic adviser Larry Summers was among those gathered at today’s White House meeting with credit card executives. But is it too much to expect that he would stay awake through the discussion?
Short answer: yes.
From the pool report:

Code Pink activists went after Obama economic adviser Larry Summers this afternoon, bounding to the conference room stage where Summers was speaking and unfurling a banner behind his back that read “We Want Our $$$ Back.”
But the most fascinating thing about the episode — aside from the fact that it took event organizers about an [...]

Speaking before a gathering of business leaders Thursday, Larry Summers, who heads the White House Economic Council, delivered what might have been the most honest assessment yet of the nation’s economic recovery.
Asked when the economy will rebound, Summers said there are only two types of experts out there wrestling with that question: “Those who know [...]

President Obama’s top economic adviser on Thursday defended his role as a leading force behind the sweeping deregulation of the finance industry a decade ago, which many experts consider to be a cause of the current economic crisis.
Appearing before hundreds of business officials in Washington, Larry Summers said the finance industry has evolved both enormously [...]

In November of 1999, when the Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve legislation deregulating the finance industry, The New York Times described part of the debate like this:
The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead [...]

It seems that Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), President Barack Obama’s pick to head the Commerce Department, doesn’t exactly believe in the necessity of that agency.
CQ’s Jonathan Allen points out that Gregg, one of the upper chamber’s most vocal fiscal hawks, voted twice in 1995 to abolish the department — once in the Budget Committee and [...]

It’s no news that many liberal critics of the Democrats’ stimulus plan are wondering why so much would go toward tax rebates and so little, relatively speaking, would target infrastructure projects. And those voices found new reason to be critical today.
A report released by the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that America’s aging bridges, [...]

A trusting Congress might be setting itself up to be burned again.