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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration has helped pull the U.S. economy back from the "abyss" with aggressive efforts to spur growth and stabilize financial markets, a top White House adviser said on Monday. Defending policies that Republicans have attacked as ineffective, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers argued measures put in place by the administration, including a $787 billion stimulus package, had helped turn back the deepest U.S. recession since the Great Depression. "Thanks largely to the Recovery Act, alongside an aggressive financial stabilization plan and a program to keep responsible homeowners in their homes, we have walked a...

Raising $100 billion a year of climate finance by 2020 is challenging, but possible through mechanisms including carbon markets, domestic carbon taxes and a variety of international transportation taxes, a United Nations advisory group said in a report Friday. Earlier this year, the UN's Ban established the panel, which includes U.S. National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, billionaire financier George Soros and Deutsche Bank vice-chairman Caio Koch-Weser. The financing will be used to support mitigation and adaptation efforts in developing countries--in particular, for the poorest and most vulnerable communities.

New York Times' Frank Rich Named Obama's Top Economic Adviser By Andrew B. Wilson on 10.26.10 @ 6:08AM Things are not going well for President Obama in his search for an economic adviser to replace the departing Larry Summers. The President had hoped to reach across the aisle -- no, make that the ditch -- to find a top businessperson to take the job. You know the ditch. It is the muddy resting place for that badly damaged car, a.k.a. the U.S. economy, which the president is trying to rescue. He says that the same people who drove the car...

Obama's praise for departing economic adviser on the "Daily Show" echoes Bush comments for Katrina-era FEMA head. Stewart's advice: "You don't want to use that phrase, dude."

Caterpillar is one excellent company. It is building new factories now in Texas, Arkansas, and North Carolina, from which it will export products made by American workers all around the world. Its excellent worldwide parts distribution network gives its used equipment a very high resale value. But on September 29 Caterpillar announced it is building its twelfth factory in China -- this one to produce mini-excavators. Why can’t Caterpillar make a profit exporting mini-excavators to China? The answer is simple: China has a 30% tariff on all excavators. In fact it has a similar high tariff on just about every...

National Journal's Victor will have the scoop in tomorrow's edition of the National Journal magazine that Obama economic adviser Christina Romer is quitting the post. It all stems from her feeling -- despite her title as chairwoman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers -- that Larry Summers has more influence with the president.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke “is a math teacher, he’s not a central banker,” former White House Budget Director David Stockman scoffs. “He is so caught up in his equations that I think he’s extremely dangerous—the worst Fed chairman we’ve ever had.” In the flat, dry accents of the Michigan farm boy he once was, Stockman tells me: “How can he believe that stimulating more credit creation and more borrowing can possibly solve the problem of a housing sector that’s drowning in debt and a federal government that’s on the edge of insolvency?… “He is the greatest enabler of Wall...

The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard. This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments...

The M3 money supply in the United States is contracting at an accelerating rate that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933, despite near zero interest rates and the biggest fiscal blitz in history The M3 figures - which include broad range of bank accounts and are tracked by British and European monetarists for warning signals about the direction of the US economy a year or so in advance - began shrinking last summer. The pace has since quickened. The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/statement-press-secretary-a-new-beginning-presidential-summit-entrepreneurship Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release March 05, 2010 Statement by the Press Secretary on A New Beginning: Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship President Obama, together with the Department of State and the Department of Commerce, will host the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., on April 26 and 27. Participants from over 40 countries on 5 continents have been invited to participate. The Summit will highlight the role entrepreneurship can play in addressing...

One angle in my recent profile of Tim Geithner concerned his relationship with Larry Summers, his former mentor and the director of the National Economic Council. I contend that Geithner, not Summers, has emerged as Obama's key adviser on financial matters, and that Summers isn't happy about it. (Not everybody was convinced.) Since my piece appeared, the buzz that Summers is looking to leave--or is being pushed out--has picked up. Earlier today, my colleague Marc Ambinder wrote about this, defending Summers against his critics while leaving open the possibility that he may, indeed, leave. My own view is a bit...

The conventional wisdom in Washington and on Wall Street has been that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner -- the target of populist outrage over Wall Street bailouts and high unemployment -- would be the first to leave the Obama administration’s economic team after the mid-term elections. But the FOX Business Network has learned that another high-ranking economic adviser may be first. Larry Summers, who heads the White House’s National Economic Council, has been described as unhappy in his job, and is suggesting in conversations that he may leave the administration by the end of the year, according to Wall Street executives...

President Obama continuously tries to portray himself as a friend to the little-man, middle class and small business. Hence his attacks on "fat cats" who "just don't get it," while labeling the extravagant bonuses as "obscene," and "the height of irresponsibility." Meanwhile, members of his administration, in defending a sweeping small-business aid program Obama announced in his State of the Union, give reason to wonder if they really understand how to help small business. Among the administration's proposals for small businesses are a $5,000 tax credit to hire new workers, elimination of capital gains taxes, and new incentives to invest...

"The blizzards that affected much of the country during the last month are likely to distort the statistics. So it's going to be very important ... to look past whatever the next figures are to gauge the underlying trends," Summers said in an interview with CNBC.

On February 9th, Obama's senior economics adviser, Larry Summers, appeared on FOX Business to discuss the President Obama’s economic plan, which includes future tax increases, record spending, and record deficits (even after accounting for the tax increase which is very disturbing in itself). Summers, contending that increased taxes reduces unemployment said, “Almost all economists who studied these things have that kind of view.” He can't be serious, can he?

There's little doubt that the Obama administration will continue its relatively accomodative, Wall Street-friendly policies for some time to come, as the still-weak banking system gets coddled back to health. But it's also true that the administration still has to do more to shed its pro-Wall Street image -- established fairly or unfairly by the likes of Matt Taibbi. One way to do that would be to start severing official ties with the various Clintonistas that inhabit The White House, most notably economic advisor Larry Summers, one of the most charged figures there is. Summers is known for being "brilliant,"...

When Larry Summers was president of Harvard, a woman by the name of Iris Mack was fired from Harvard Capital Management. The problem with this? A month before she was fired she sent Summers an email warning him about the quality of the portfolio managers at HMC and also about the dangerous derivatives positions that HMC was taking on that ultimately resulted in huge losses for Harvard. {snip] The story of Summers' mismanagement of Harvard's finances appears to be a story that won't seem to die. Most recently showcased by Bloomberg. Now focus appears to be picking up on Mack,...

President Obama's top economic adviser Lawrence Summers today for the first time predicted that job growth would begin as early as this spring. "I believe that, as do most professional forecasters, that by spring, employment growth will start to be turning positive," Summers told ABC's "This Week." It's the first time the White House has predicted job growth on such a short timetable. Summers would not commit to a timeline during an earlier ABC News interview on Dec. 4, the day the last jobs report was released. That jobs report showed the national unemployment had dropped in November, from 10.2...

President Barack Obama's economic advisers are talking tough about the banks ahead of his meeting with heads of financial institutions. Larry Summers and Christina Romer say Obama will press bankers Monday to ease lending to help Americans get back to work. As Summers put it, bankers need to recognize that "they've got obligations to the country after all that's been done for them." He says no major bank would be intact without the government's bailout of the financial sector, and now they need to do all they can to get credit flowing again.

According to a university colleague, former president of Harvard and current White House economist Larry Summers once asked for help to "f--- up" one of the school's conservative professors.