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I have a friend who worked at Harvard as a VP under Summers. He said Summers is the biggest A-hole he had ever encountered in academia, and that’s saying something.

My fondest memory of Summers comes from 1980. Ronald Reagan was in a heated race for the Presidency running on an economic platform that a 70% tax rate was too high and that taxes needed to be cut in order to ~~stimulate~~ reduce the government impedance of economic growth. Summers boldly predicted that Reagan's tax-cutting proposal would lead to a 40% inflation rate within two years. (Inflation that year was already running in double-digits. Yet two years into Reagan's Presidency, the rate had fallen below 3%.)

Summers also played a key role in deregulating the derivatives market which caused the economic collapse of 2008. So I expect Summers to be another in a long list of Fed Chairmen who get it wrong again and again and again. The only hope that he brings to the table is that he brings an end to the current money expansion policy that Bernanke is employing. However, Summer's past relationship with Goldman-Sachs would indicate that this policy will continue.