After three decades of creating ruin and disaster across the globe, Larry Summers is finally being pushed from the lofty heights of power and prestige.
The proximate cause of his downfall are recently released emails between Summers and suicided arms dealer/sex trafficker/intelligence asset/money launderer Jeffrey Epstein.
The emails show the married, middle-aged Summers going to Epstein for advice on how best to manipulate a woman he claimed to be mentoring into a sexual relationship.
Summers comes off like a complete putz in the exchange:
Summers: We talked on the phone. Then “I can’t talk later”. Dint think I can talk tomorrow”. I said what are you up to. She said “I’m busy”. I said awfully coy u are. And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming” She said no his schedule changed after we changed our plans. I said ok I got to go call me when u feel like it. Tone was not of good feeling. I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.
Epstein: shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.
While it’s nice to finally see Summers pushed off the world stage (we hope!), Matt Stoller, Rudy Havenstein and others are pointing out that Summers’ loathsome exchange with Epstein is the least of his sins.
Surely it’s more important that Summers was “wrong on the big important stuff for most of his career” as Stoller put it than that he was a creep who looked to a monster for advice on attempted adultery.
Politico sums up Summers’ prodigious rise in politics, for which he abandoned his Harvard tenure:
Summers would never achieve the type of intellectual breakthroughs that his uncles had. Perhaps he was too attracted to — too distracted by — the more muscular life of political power and influence that he first experienced in 1981, when he went to Washington to work with Feldstein, Ronald Reagan’s chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The year after winning the Clark medal, Summers headed to the capital again to work at the World Bank, then joined Lloyd Bentsen’s Treasury Department in the new Clinton administration.
…
(Summers) would become Robert Rubin’s deputy when Rubin took over from Bentsen in 1995. Their work together on the international debt crises of the 1990s made Summers famous; in February 1999, TIME magazine put him, Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan on its cover, with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.” A few months later, Summers succeeded Rubin as Treasury Secretary, serving until the end of the Clinton presidency.
Havenstein recommends (among other excellent pieces) this 2010 Charles Ferguson take down of Summers from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some highlights:
…rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy.
…
As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation in many domains, including finance. Later, as deputy secretary of the treasury and then treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he implemented those policies. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial sector. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that would cause so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state antigambling laws.
Summers didn’t just lay the groundwork for the economic crash of the 2000s, he actively mocked those who warned it was coming:
When other economists began warning of abuses and systemic risk in the financial system deriving from the environment that Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin had created, Summers mocked and dismissed those warnings. In 2005, at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., conference of the world’s leading central bankers, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan, presented a brilliant paper that constituted the first prominent warning of the coming crisis. Rajan pointed out that the structure of financial-sector compensation, in combination with complex financial products, gave bankers huge cash incentives to take risks with other people’s money, while imposing no penalties for any subsequent losses. Rajan warned that this bonus culture rewarded bankers for actions that could destroy their own institutions, or even the entire system, and that this could generate a “full-blown financial crisis” and a “catastrophic meltdown.”
When Rajan finished speaking, Summers rose up from the audience and attacked him, calling him a “Luddite,” dismissing his concerns, and warning that increased regulation would reduce the productivity of the financial sector.
But the punchline came when Summers was put in charge of the Obama administration’s response to the very crash his policies created:
after the 2008 financial crisis and its consequent recession, Summers was placed in charge of coordinating U.S. economic policy, deftly marginalizing others who challenged him. Under the stewardship of Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke, the Obama administration adopted policies as favorable toward the financial sector as those of the Clinton and Bush administrations—quite a feat. Never once has Summers publicly apologized or admitted any responsibility for causing the crisis.
Incredibly, before the release of his Epstein correspondence Summers had been playing a leading role in formulating the Center for American Progress’s Project 2029, intended to guide the policy for a potential Democratic administration to follow Trump 2.0.
The highest-profile think tank on the center-left, the Center for American Progress (CAP), has assigned several high-profile policy types to lead an effort that documents show was internally described as “Project 2029.”
According to two people with knowledge of the arrangement and a member of CAP, one of the leads on the economic policy plank for this project is Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers…
They also said that Summers was the final sign-off on a CAP housing policy paper set to be released next week.
Could it be any clearer that the Democratic party and all its policy apparatchiks are enemies of the people and must be completely purged from the party for it to have any chance on delivering positive results for the American people?
No matter how vast the conspiracies of Jeffrey Epstein, no matter how deeply tied he was to American and Israeli intelligence (and Drop Site News has proven Epstein was both), Larry Summers ruined vastly more lives, caused more death and suffering, and did more harm in his public roles as an economics advisor to two Democratic U.S. Presidents.
It’s also important to note that he started his political career working for the Republican Reagan administration and seamlessly transitioned to the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations to complete the neoliberal economic transformation begun under Reagan.
Now that the U.S. economy is completely hollowed out and its days as a global hegemon are rapidly coming to a close, Summers is finally being pushed from his high seats at Harvard, Open AI, and the Center for American Progress.
Too bad it came at least 20 years too late.
bruce wilder
I knew Obama was going to be poison when Larry showed up, but almost no one I knew, knew who he was. Larry Summers did not hide who he is. He is, by the way, physically repulsive and personally arrogant and abrasive — talk about being able to judge a book by its cover. Epstein was handsome and charming; Larry certainly wasn’t and evidence for his alleged nepo genius status was thin.
That he can be so destructive in a continuing very powerful, prestige role in the Democratic Party and never encounters effective opposition tells you how pointless Democratic Party politics is. If your organization cannot filter your experts better than that . . .
mago
Larry Summers: troglodyte or gargoyle? I can’t decide.
spud
i know many democrats who simply will not say a thing about what was done to america by bill clinton and his gang.
they simply blame reagan and the gop. as far as raygun is concerned, i am sure he would have loved to have gone much further, he did not for various reasons. however, clinton, he was what the rich dreamed about for over six decades.
and almost all damage done so far, he and his gang are the most responsible.
either the democrats pull a trump on national t.v. and call our clinton,obama/biden gang, or we slide ever further, because the democrats are so tarnished and radioactive, that trump types can still keep and gain power.
calling anything democrat center left, is a crime.
Sherrod Brown still heard from his constituents about nafta in the 2024 election he lost.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/16/sherrod-brown-democrats-00189956
“But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.”
most workers that were gutted by bill clintons nafta, are either retired or worked to death, or died by deaths of despair.
so these mostly are younger people. working people have long memories. the stench from the clintonites is just to strong to over come.
unless some democrat who is not corrupt and not polite, tells it to the american people who did what to whom, and why, the democrats will be viewed as the party of elites who created the oligarchs, and it was true, they did.
bruce wilder
mtg gave up
jrkrideau
Summers was just a passing name to me but I remember thinking a few years ago that Summers was always wrong.
If one was setting policy the best thing to do was the opposite of what Summers was recommending.
Jan Wiklund
One should not be too optimistic. He survived the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, see e.g. https://www.the92ers.com/dunce/lawrence-summers. He seems to have more lives than a cat.
Mark Level
Great take-down, but in all fairness it’s no harder than shooting fish in a barrel. Summers is utter garbage, and always has been. To answer Mago he is a Garglodyte, a nightmare hybrid creature from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. Not quite Lovecraftian, but headed in that direction, that will probably be his next incarnation.
Bill Clinton was the perfect Rethuglican Lite creation of the Duopoly Elites. He seemed cool, played the sax, he and his wife simulated competence. They were competent at taking orders from the 0.1%, kicking down, and what the Elites wanted. Sleazy lawyers, in Arkansas their big issue was hating on teachers because they have unions, how dare they? NAFTA was a scam worthy of Bernie Madoff. Promise it will “grow the economy” in both Mexico and the US, the exact opposite of what it was designed to do and did. Oh, and let’s not forget all the hippie-punching, “Super Predators” and firing Dr. Jocelyn Elders for noting masturbation is a harmless activity that does not spread venereal diseases, how dare she flaunt the Bible that way? Thoroughly reactionary the both of them, but Hillary had the chutzpah to write books like “It Takes a Village” to pretend to be an advocate for “women and children” while her husband gutted “Welfare as we know it” and plunged millions of unfortunates into deeper poverty and immiseration.
But hey, then their children can be recruited into sex-trafficking, right, gotta survive somehow. Thus we do have Epstein on the sidelines totally protected by the legal apparatus of both parties, working mainly for Israel but for other scammers and criminals and Oligarchs as well. Trump was mostly an on-the-sidelines donor at this time, but credit where credit is due: the ’08 Greenspan Crash was a joint Bush-Obama project to knock the floor out from under working and middle-class Americans and plunge them into misery and precarity, and it worked like a dream, creating the Ta-dahh!! resentful Trump voter who’d blame it all on the black and brown people . . . (Oh and Greenspan’s wife was a major MSM “reporter” cheering on the destruction, no conflict of interest there, folks.)
spud has been a really great relatively new commenter on this site, I also had stumbled across that Politico piece (even though it’s far from a favorite site for me), the Dems fielded phony psuedo-“left” friends of the working class like Sherrod Brown, former Republican-for-Decades Elizabeth Warren, “a capitalist to my very bones” who briefly created an evanescent CFPB that could help a few thousand people for a very short period of time before TPTB destroyed it. Oh, and she made sure to stay in the Primary Race during Obama’s Night of the Long Knives in order to destroy Bernie and install the reactionary, segregationist lickspittle Joe “Brain-Bleed” Biden, leading directly to a 2nd Trump term.
Don’t forget when he was running investments for Harvard that Larry lost several billions from their coffers! It’s a feature, not a bug, but he was the “expert.”
The Center for American Progress is openly Center Right, pretense that it is “Left” except to the more oligarchic and fascistic Rethugs is utterly unsupported by evidence. It seeks Regress to the Gilded Age. Harper’s did a great piece late in Obama’s first term correctly comparing his small “stimulus” to the policies of Herbert Hoover and correctly predicted it would result in minor improvement after over a decade . . .
It’s all about disciplining the Plebs, the WTO– WEF way, “You will own nothing and be happy,” fight with the other half of Americans who don’t share your Identity or Gender politics & imagine that does something, the voters have absolutely NO pull viz the Plutocratic Economy that is set up where the House always wins and the peons always lose.
In closing, returning briefly to Epstein, the man halfway behind the curtain– I guess it was in the last thread that somebody brought up Drop Site News, they have been doing some great stuff, Ryan Grim used to be a dull, MOR ShitLib who said vote Dimmie but even he has wised up, perhaps even been radicalized.
The moronic, Ukraine Fascism Cheerleading LG&M pretend-Left (not really, very pro-Zio, pro-war, Clintonian) did a piece decrying Merrick Garland, Larry Summers and some of the others “20 years too late” as NWT says, link here– https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/11/an-epstein-honeymoon
They gladly endorse Matt Taibbi’s spew however, “The Epstein Story is Beginning to Look Like Russiagate”, nothing to see here folks, please move along to Taylor Swift stories or something more anodyne.
If you really want to be repelled, read down into the comments. Drop Site News is angrily attacked, they dare to connect Epstein to Israel and there is absolutely NO evidence that supports that, it is just unhinged “anti-Semitism” (oh, despite the fact most Ashkenazi Jews are not Semites, the Palestinian Canaanites are Semites.) These people are deeply sick, and Deep State through and through, say anything negative about Israeli militarism, Apartheid and Genocide and you’re literally a follower of the mustache man to these people . . .
Even they now pretend to despise Summers and some of that ilk (not the Clintons however.)
somecomputerguy
Courtesy of Digby;
The president, Larry Summers, a dirty hippie and the pope were all on Air Force One when it started to have engine trouble. The pilot opened the door of the cockpit and said with terror in his voice, “The plane is going down, so put on a parachute and jump! I’ll show you how.” The pilot grabbed a parachute from the pile, strapped it on, opened the plane’s door, and took the leap.
After his departure, the four people left were startled to notice there were only three parachutes left in the pile. The president humbly suggested that the other three take the parachutes but the others protest saying, “no, Mr President, the world needs you, you must take one of the parachutes.” After a few minutes of haggling, the president agrees and straps on his chute and jumped.
The remaining three look at each other for a moment at which point, wild-eyed and sweating, Larry Summers says,“the world needs my genius” grabs one of the parachutes and jumps.
The dirty hippie and the pope sit quietly for a moment and the pope says, “you must take the last parachute, my son, it is God’s will.”
The hippie replies, “Father, there are plenty of parachutes. The smartest man in the world just jumped out of the airplane wearing my backpack”
spud
Mark Level”
i have always said that bill clinton turned a whole generation of women into meth dealers and prostitutes.
first time i heard him speak in 1992, i said he will gut the new deal/fair deal and Gatt, and he did.
i just cannot see anyway to vote our way out of this. it will have to be another way. all will be risky that is.
the right has captured to much power and following.
but the right being the right, will always, and i mean always, way over reach and stretch, whilst pummeling their very own base.
will a majority of the military go along? not so sure with their families on food stamps, and the veterans administration becoming more efficient(sarcasm here), once its gutted and handed over to private sector parasites.
will the police, their unions, the Da’s and judges go along? almost all will. they already have a long history of immunity, which breeds elitism, which breeds contempt and attracts psychopaths.
trump is already moving in this direction with the police and military.