LS: He got America to move way back towards getting on track after a deeply dangerous and crazy period.
The most flagrant, mind-blowing disinformation yet. 70+% of Americans disagree that the country is on the right track.
Women’s rights are being annihilated by Baden’s maniacal insistence on trashing Title IX.
Savings are being decimated by Bidenflation.
Afghanistan is a terrorist hub due to Biden;s foreign policy.
The fraud of “green energy” is destroying our energy independence.
Our national sovereignty is being eliminated entirely by his failure to enforce our immigration laws and borders.
Our education system is in tatters because of his teacher union loyalty, catastrophic COVID policies, and monumentally stupid social engineering.
His merry band of economic illiterates is sending the economies of families and the country down the toilet.
And his “armed, prepared to use force” IRS is about to become an American Gestapo.
Great job there, Larry.
It is really difficult to understand how someone of such supposed intelligence and experience could venerate such poor performance, and consider this a “return to normal.”
"Larry Summers is one of the most important economists in the world. He’s been the chief economist at the World Bank. He was Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. He was director of the National Economic Council under Obama."
I am sorry Bari but with CV like this, Mr Summers is one of the most responsible for financial issues USA is facing now. He was one of biggest proponents of abolishing of Glass–Steagall Act, which lead to financial meltdown in 2008. He didnt "predicted" that. Consequences of this, we see still today.
His testimony as Treasury Secretary to Congress about effects of having permanent Normal Trade Relations with Chinas and its assentation to WTO in 2000 is legendary on how wrong it was. Entire thing can be found her
**There are, however, three crucial advantages to the United States in passing this bill, which I would like to focus on today:
-First, there are the direct and commercial benefits of the market opening agreement that we concluded last fall.
-Second, there are the economic and broader benefits to the United States of promoting economic and social change in China.
-Third, there is the ultimate enhancement of America's national security interests that comes from integrating China more closely with the community of nations.**
In reality only one thing happened, Wall Streat has outsourced all American Manufacturing to China, thus killing manufacturing heartlands of USA, and making us dependent on Communist Dictatorship.
Larry Summers is thus one of the "experts" that got us in this mess. He supported outsourcing of US manufacturing to China, then supported abolishing regulation that kept Wall Street in check. He didnt predict anything.
Mr Summers lost his credibility to me with his last comment about Joe Biden: "He got America to move way back towards getting on track after a deeply dangerous and crazy period."
I just listened to a breakdown of the bill’s supposed reduction in out-of-pocket medication costs. These reductions don’t start going into effect until 2024-2026. By 2029-2030, there will be a whopping 20 medications on the list. That part of the bill is complete BS and another example of our government bending over to big pharma. But it lets democrats campaign on reducing medication costs right before a mid-term election when many older voters won’t even be alive when these reductions are supposed to go into effect. Again, it’s political BS.
I don’t know much about Larry Summers but I find it hard to believe that with the positions he’s held, that his advice/policy recommendations didn’t help lead us to where we’re at. In fact, based on him helping to push this bill through tells me all I need to know about his contributions to our financial mess. The solution is always to spend more money we don’t have. Printing new money in a time when we have massive inflation due to the increase in our money supply will never make sense. Here’s an idea, how about no new money gets printed until inflation gets back down the 2%.
Anyone interested in an alternative take on the inflation mess should look up Professor Steve Hanke. I listened to an interview with him in June 2021 and he absolutely nailed the prediction for our inflation level and says it’s here to stay for at least another 12 months. More importantly, he explains that the most critical contribution to inflation is the rate of expansion in the money supply. At the peak of “Covid relief,” our money supply was growing at 20% a year. Less than 5% growth is generally considered necessary to keep inflation down around 2-3%. So we were way over that. Last I heard, the money supply was growing at 12% a year, so we’re still more than twice what we need to be at. Thus a spending bill that dumps billions or trillions of new money into the economy is the last thing we need to drive down inflation. I know there’s different theories in economics but so far, Professor Hanke has been right so I trust him more than the guy telling us more government spending is the cure to our cancer.
No offense to Mr. Summers but from the outside, it looks like he was critical of the cool kids until the cool kids invited him into their group. Then he drank the cool-aid and is now spouting off the same garbage we get from other financial gurus (Yellen, Powell, etc.).
"It’s tempting to blame it on politics, but I don't think there’s heavy political motivation among the prominent business economics forecasters at the major financial firms. "
It’s a good thing inflation is just a theoretical term economists use. As a basic plebe, I don’t know what it really represents. Kinda like I really don’t understand what a recession is. You have to be an expert to use big words like that.
Biden got America back on track except for the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan (which no one was held accountable for), the crushing inflation and expanding debt of working class Americans (which no one is held accountable for), a nightmarish border situation where human trafficking killings and sexual abuse are mundane at this point (They did go after border guards over a picture, there is that at least), the Ukraine nightmare which only has small chance of expanding into a nuclear war (The admin views this a success). Other normalities include the possible assassination and targeting of Supreme Court justices , a raid on a former president with ever shifting justifications and a not recession.
I have enormously mixed feelings about Summers. His economic views seem sound in general, but in the case of the current boondoggle legislation I am surprised he buys into the climate change rationale for all that subsidizing and tax crediting that will not lower the earth's temperature one one-thousandths of a degree ever. Most of all, I find it infuriating that he asserts his opposition to the cancel culture of academia. He had a golden opportunity to stop it when they went after him at Harvard for daring to say something absolutely reasonable about women in the sciences. He should have stood his ground and fought. He did not. Harvard today is a hopeless mess, and his failure of nerve was a key turning point in that decline. And finally, STILL in the face of these catastrophes of the Maoist left, he comes down on the side of ludicrously praising BIden and opposing populism. To the degree populism is turning ugly (it need not be in essence) it is because elite figures like Summers have flinched in defending the liberalism that once stood strong against the mob, but does so no more.
Lightning Round: Since the last administration was so “dangerous” - why was inflation exceeded by wage growth, unemployment at record lows, income taxes reduced + federal revenues high, consumer and small business confidence indices at record highs and consumer energy prices low?
I can’t help myself. I MUST comment further, not on the content of the interview, but on its implications.
Bari, and Larry Summers, and the globalist cabal that have lost their collective minds over Trump and the people who voted for him are seemingly oblivious to the realities of those people. I assert, on intuition not data, that 99% of Trump supporters are not enthralled by his personal traits, his hubris, his flamboyance, his narcissism. Rather, they see in him a (flawed) champion for the ethos that this country was formed upon: the rejection of potentates and kings, the determination to escape serfism, the right to self-determination, the striving for individual liberty and the creation of all men as equals.
Globalism is merely the cloak for a totalitarianism underwritten, ironically, by fabulous capitalist wealth. It is motivated by avarice, not altruism. It suppresses freedom and reduces the masses to statistics.
And its consequences will be the same as those over 200 years ago: revolt against oppression. As they say, history may not repeat itself, but it most surely does rhyme. And THIS will not be a verse of the nursery variety.
Larry Summers is a lifelong Democrat who is fully aware of the economic damage the Biden administrative is foisting on the American people. But Larry would love to get back into the game. Unfortunately for him he sometimes inadvertently speaks the truth. For example the Harvard incidents with Cornell West and the crack about females and relative absence in stem professions. By not sticking entirely to the playbook Summers cost himself some major Washington jobs such a Fed Chairman and Treasury Secretary in Democrat administrations. It is easy to see in the interview with Bari that he is reluctant to put his foot in his mouth once again. I think Bari should seek an interview with Thomas Sowell at Hoover and ask him what he thinks of Biden economics and where it's taking this country.
My megaphone may be smaller, but my advice to Larry Summers is that he can go pound sand. Inflation is when too much money is chasing too few goods and services, and no amount of verbal gymnastics can tap dance around that inconvenient fact.
"I think the Wharton study you quoted substantially underestimates the revenue gains from increased tax enforcement in the bill. It also doesn’t take any account of the non-macroeconomic factors—the superior purchasing of prescription drugs and the increased availability of low-cost energy. Anybody making an overall policy judgment should include those factors."
The increased tax enforcement trope has been trotted out at least since Reagan. It's effective in knocking down the CBO score, but for him to think it's going to have some actual effect is ridiculous. The other two factors he felt important enought to mention are equally fanciful. Prescription drug purchasing is going to "superior" and energy will be "low-cost". All because of this bill.
Someone please enlighten me. He believes that in 2021 we were spending too much and he warned of the dangers of inflation. GOT IT. Check and agree.
In 2022 there was a bill proposed that would result in spending even more. But this time, the bill didn’t put money in the hands of the citizens, this time the bill put the money in the hands of government administrative agencies to address the behaviors of the citizens. He believes this bill is better and met with a politician who opposed the bill, had a conversation he won’t tell you about, but was worded strongly enough to change the politician’s vote on the bill to one that supported it, because there are other things in the bill that he supports. And He doesn’t believe that the financial policies being setforth are politically motivated? Ok…he just verified my distrust. What parallel universe is this? The only respect I have for this man is that he respects Milton Friedman AND that teaching Keynesian methods should never had been canceled. How else are people going to learn that Keynesian methodologies don’t work and Milton Friedman is respected because his methodologies do work?
Larry summers IS the bastardization of modern monetary theory. He “questions Trumps motives” because Trump is the first politician in his life that does not agree with the largest wealth transfer in human history that Summer oversaw during his time in the Obama administration (I wrote on this in my stack about the size of the government) and the new largest wealth transfer in human history that he’s helping guide now
Imagine how good it has to feel to know you’ve disagreed with every decision Summers has ever made - it’s the key to sleeping well at night.
BW: What do you think Joe Biden’s legacy will be?
LS: He got America to move way back towards getting on track after a deeply dangerous and crazy period.
The most flagrant, mind-blowing disinformation yet. 70+% of Americans disagree that the country is on the right track.
Women’s rights are being annihilated by Baden’s maniacal insistence on trashing Title IX.
Savings are being decimated by Bidenflation.
Afghanistan is a terrorist hub due to Biden;s foreign policy.
The fraud of “green energy” is destroying our energy independence.
Our national sovereignty is being eliminated entirely by his failure to enforce our immigration laws and borders.
Our education system is in tatters because of his teacher union loyalty, catastrophic COVID policies, and monumentally stupid social engineering.
His merry band of economic illiterates is sending the economies of families and the country down the toilet.
And his “armed, prepared to use force” IRS is about to become an American Gestapo.
Great job there, Larry.
It is really difficult to understand how someone of such supposed intelligence and experience could venerate such poor performance, and consider this a “return to normal.”
"Larry Summers is one of the most important economists in the world. He’s been the chief economist at the World Bank. He was Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. He was director of the National Economic Council under Obama."
I am sorry Bari but with CV like this, Mr Summers is one of the most responsible for financial issues USA is facing now. He was one of biggest proponents of abolishing of Glass–Steagall Act, which lead to financial meltdown in 2008. He didnt "predicted" that. Consequences of this, we see still today.
His testimony as Treasury Secretary to Congress about effects of having permanent Normal Trade Relations with Chinas and its assentation to WTO in 2000 is legendary on how wrong it was. Entire thing can be found her
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB957377738406963350
Small excerpt of what he clamed is following
**There are, however, three crucial advantages to the United States in passing this bill, which I would like to focus on today:
-First, there are the direct and commercial benefits of the market opening agreement that we concluded last fall.
-Second, there are the economic and broader benefits to the United States of promoting economic and social change in China.
-Third, there is the ultimate enhancement of America's national security interests that comes from integrating China more closely with the community of nations.**
In reality only one thing happened, Wall Streat has outsourced all American Manufacturing to China, thus killing manufacturing heartlands of USA, and making us dependent on Communist Dictatorship.
Larry Summers is thus one of the "experts" that got us in this mess. He supported outsourcing of US manufacturing to China, then supported abolishing regulation that kept Wall Street in check. He didnt predict anything.
Another of his "pearls" can be found here :
https://www.deseret.com/1999/10/25/19472096/u-s-treasury-secretary-says-china-s-wto-entry-would-ease-disputes
For nice overview who Mr Summers really is check this old article (2013) in "The Nation"
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/return-lawrence-summers-mr-spectacular-failure/
For his services to Wall Street in 2008 during financial meltdown, Mr Summers was paid $8 Million in speaking fees by Wall Street banks.
Mr Summers lost his credibility to me with his last comment about Joe Biden: "He got America to move way back towards getting on track after a deeply dangerous and crazy period."
Typical globalist. It must kill him inside that Trumps economy was far better then Biden’s. Democrats destroy everything they touch
Thanks for 87,000 More IRS AGENTS Larry. Those audits are gonna be a blast!!
“ Making sure that populism does not completely pollute American politics to the point of producing dangerous outcomes in 2024.”
Huh? We are living in the MIDST of dangerous outcomes right now. Summers has TDS.
I just listened to a breakdown of the bill’s supposed reduction in out-of-pocket medication costs. These reductions don’t start going into effect until 2024-2026. By 2029-2030, there will be a whopping 20 medications on the list. That part of the bill is complete BS and another example of our government bending over to big pharma. But it lets democrats campaign on reducing medication costs right before a mid-term election when many older voters won’t even be alive when these reductions are supposed to go into effect. Again, it’s political BS.
I don’t know much about Larry Summers but I find it hard to believe that with the positions he’s held, that his advice/policy recommendations didn’t help lead us to where we’re at. In fact, based on him helping to push this bill through tells me all I need to know about his contributions to our financial mess. The solution is always to spend more money we don’t have. Printing new money in a time when we have massive inflation due to the increase in our money supply will never make sense. Here’s an idea, how about no new money gets printed until inflation gets back down the 2%.
Anyone interested in an alternative take on the inflation mess should look up Professor Steve Hanke. I listened to an interview with him in June 2021 and he absolutely nailed the prediction for our inflation level and says it’s here to stay for at least another 12 months. More importantly, he explains that the most critical contribution to inflation is the rate of expansion in the money supply. At the peak of “Covid relief,” our money supply was growing at 20% a year. Less than 5% growth is generally considered necessary to keep inflation down around 2-3%. So we were way over that. Last I heard, the money supply was growing at 12% a year, so we’re still more than twice what we need to be at. Thus a spending bill that dumps billions or trillions of new money into the economy is the last thing we need to drive down inflation. I know there’s different theories in economics but so far, Professor Hanke has been right so I trust him more than the guy telling us more government spending is the cure to our cancer.
No offense to Mr. Summers but from the outside, it looks like he was critical of the cool kids until the cool kids invited him into their group. Then he drank the cool-aid and is now spouting off the same garbage we get from other financial gurus (Yellen, Powell, etc.).
"It’s tempting to blame it on politics, but I don't think there’s heavy political motivation among the prominent business economics forecasters at the major financial firms. "
It’s a good thing inflation is just a theoretical term economists use. As a basic plebe, I don’t know what it really represents. Kinda like I really don’t understand what a recession is. You have to be an expert to use big words like that.
It’s ALL politics.
Biden got America back on track except for the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan (which no one was held accountable for), the crushing inflation and expanding debt of working class Americans (which no one is held accountable for), a nightmarish border situation where human trafficking killings and sexual abuse are mundane at this point (They did go after border guards over a picture, there is that at least), the Ukraine nightmare which only has small chance of expanding into a nuclear war (The admin views this a success). Other normalities include the possible assassination and targeting of Supreme Court justices , a raid on a former president with ever shifting justifications and a not recession.
I have enormously mixed feelings about Summers. His economic views seem sound in general, but in the case of the current boondoggle legislation I am surprised he buys into the climate change rationale for all that subsidizing and tax crediting that will not lower the earth's temperature one one-thousandths of a degree ever. Most of all, I find it infuriating that he asserts his opposition to the cancel culture of academia. He had a golden opportunity to stop it when they went after him at Harvard for daring to say something absolutely reasonable about women in the sciences. He should have stood his ground and fought. He did not. Harvard today is a hopeless mess, and his failure of nerve was a key turning point in that decline. And finally, STILL in the face of these catastrophes of the Maoist left, he comes down on the side of ludicrously praising BIden and opposing populism. To the degree populism is turning ugly (it need not be in essence) it is because elite figures like Summers have flinched in defending the liberalism that once stood strong against the mob, but does so no more.
Lightning Round: Since the last administration was so “dangerous” - why was inflation exceeded by wage growth, unemployment at record lows, income taxes reduced + federal revenues high, consumer and small business confidence indices at record highs and consumer energy prices low?
I can’t help myself. I MUST comment further, not on the content of the interview, but on its implications.
Bari, and Larry Summers, and the globalist cabal that have lost their collective minds over Trump and the people who voted for him are seemingly oblivious to the realities of those people. I assert, on intuition not data, that 99% of Trump supporters are not enthralled by his personal traits, his hubris, his flamboyance, his narcissism. Rather, they see in him a (flawed) champion for the ethos that this country was formed upon: the rejection of potentates and kings, the determination to escape serfism, the right to self-determination, the striving for individual liberty and the creation of all men as equals.
Globalism is merely the cloak for a totalitarianism underwritten, ironically, by fabulous capitalist wealth. It is motivated by avarice, not altruism. It suppresses freedom and reduces the masses to statistics.
And its consequences will be the same as those over 200 years ago: revolt against oppression. As they say, history may not repeat itself, but it most surely does rhyme. And THIS will not be a verse of the nursery variety.
Larry Summers is a lifelong Democrat who is fully aware of the economic damage the Biden administrative is foisting on the American people. But Larry would love to get back into the game. Unfortunately for him he sometimes inadvertently speaks the truth. For example the Harvard incidents with Cornell West and the crack about females and relative absence in stem professions. By not sticking entirely to the playbook Summers cost himself some major Washington jobs such a Fed Chairman and Treasury Secretary in Democrat administrations. It is easy to see in the interview with Bari that he is reluctant to put his foot in his mouth once again. I think Bari should seek an interview with Thomas Sowell at Hoover and ask him what he thinks of Biden economics and where it's taking this country.
My megaphone may be smaller, but my advice to Larry Summers is that he can go pound sand. Inflation is when too much money is chasing too few goods and services, and no amount of verbal gymnastics can tap dance around that inconvenient fact.
He lost me early with this paragraph.
"I think the Wharton study you quoted substantially underestimates the revenue gains from increased tax enforcement in the bill. It also doesn’t take any account of the non-macroeconomic factors—the superior purchasing of prescription drugs and the increased availability of low-cost energy. Anybody making an overall policy judgment should include those factors."
The increased tax enforcement trope has been trotted out at least since Reagan. It's effective in knocking down the CBO score, but for him to think it's going to have some actual effect is ridiculous. The other two factors he felt important enought to mention are equally fanciful. Prescription drug purchasing is going to "superior" and energy will be "low-cost". All because of this bill.
Someone please enlighten me. He believes that in 2021 we were spending too much and he warned of the dangers of inflation. GOT IT. Check and agree.
In 2022 there was a bill proposed that would result in spending even more. But this time, the bill didn’t put money in the hands of the citizens, this time the bill put the money in the hands of government administrative agencies to address the behaviors of the citizens. He believes this bill is better and met with a politician who opposed the bill, had a conversation he won’t tell you about, but was worded strongly enough to change the politician’s vote on the bill to one that supported it, because there are other things in the bill that he supports. And He doesn’t believe that the financial policies being setforth are politically motivated? Ok…he just verified my distrust. What parallel universe is this? The only respect I have for this man is that he respects Milton Friedman AND that teaching Keynesian methods should never had been canceled. How else are people going to learn that Keynesian methodologies don’t work and Milton Friedman is respected because his methodologies do work?
Larry summers IS the bastardization of modern monetary theory. He “questions Trumps motives” because Trump is the first politician in his life that does not agree with the largest wealth transfer in human history that Summer oversaw during his time in the Obama administration (I wrote on this in my stack about the size of the government) and the new largest wealth transfer in human history that he’s helping guide now
Imagine how good it has to feel to know you’ve disagreed with every decision Summers has ever made - it’s the key to sleeping well at night.