Free Republic

(01-07) 09:56 PST WASHINGTON (AP) -- He has helped write popular television dramas and has stroked many a sweet drop shot on the tennis court. He has written a book about education in developing countries. And now, for the second time in his career, Gene Sperling, never formally educated as an economist, will rise to one of the top economic posts in the U.S. government. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/01/07/national/w095619S04.DTL#ixzz1AZ8gAdm6

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,...

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.

President Barack Obama, taping Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, gave a shout-out to Lawrence Summers – one the outgoing director of the White House National Economic Council probably could have done without. Mr. Summers did “a heckuva job,” Mr. Obama said. Mr. Stewart quickly admonished: “You don’t want to use that phrase, dude.” The reference, of course, was to former President George W. Bush’s praise of then-FEMA director Michael Brown’s management of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts – a job widely considered bungled.

A day after President Obama declared that his administration is not “some academic exercise,” Lawrence Summers announced plans to step down as director of the president’s National Economic Council and return to Harvard University. Christina Romer just left her post as head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to go back to the University of California, Berkeley. The current administration has suffered from a historic lack of private-sector experience,

Summers is out at end of year. I heard he wanted to extend the tax cuts to everyone, and Obama the commie was against it. Summers has been partially on target, but mostly he's still a Keynesian and water carrier. Atlantic Monthly says Obama shouldn't get an ex-CEO to be his financial advisor...duh, like the blue blood lib mag is gonna say differently. I say Obama will put another PhD there to theorize because he's too arrogant and hateful to do otherwise. He thinks he just didn't have the right person to the post to make his beliefs become reality.

"Ideas may be cut loose from experience in two senses: either they have no roots in experience, or they are not submitted to the test of experience. Either way, they are free to be foolish." So wrote Jeane Kirkpatrick in the Introduction to her landmark book, Dictatorships and Double Standards (New York, 1982, p. 10). Kirkpatrick's statement applies perfectly to the band of naïve idealists now in change of our government. The youthful dreamers guiding the Obama administration have almost no private-sector experience. Like Obama himself, the Cabinet and host of czars who direct policy have spent their lives in...

UCubed, a group representing unemployed and underemployed workers, sharply criticized Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for his handling of the economy after the Labor Department last week announced that jobless claims had unexpectedly jumped to 500,000. "The pace of job losses is increasing, and Secretary Geithner doesn't have a clue on how to end this grave recession," said Rick Sloan, the group's acting executive director, in prepared remarks. Sloan noted a September 2009 interview with ABC where Geithner predicted that in 12 months jobs would be easier to find and income growth would accelerate. "Geithner was delusional then and he's even...

Joy Tiz ©2010 We’ve tried 19 months of government-as-community organizer. It hasn’t worked. Our fresh start needs to begin now. -John Boehner House minority leader, John Boehner called out the community-organizer-in-chief for his calamitous management of the nation’s economy. "I have had enough – and the American people have had enough – of Washington politicians talking about wanting to create jobs as a ploy to get themselves re-elected while doing everything possible to prevent jobs from being created." Not that the moribund media would tell you, but Boehner delivered his remarks at a speech before the City Club of Cleveland....

Dollar Plunges As Everyone Now Figures Return Of Quantitative Easing Is A Done Deal Joe Weisenthal Aug. 24, 2010, 10:45 AM Today the weak economic data is not prompting a flight-to-the-dollar. Today the weak economic data is causing dollar selling, because it's becoming crystal clear to folks, as ForexLive notes, that quantitative easing II is now a done deal. No more baby steps or holding the balance sheet steady. There's no excuse for the Fed Board of Governors to be have an unclear picture of the economy's direction anymore. And we may not have to wait for very long. Bernanke...

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.

Three-quarters of the seven million jobs that have vanished in the recession belonged to men. The male unemployment rate is now 9.8%, vs. 8.1% for women. The trend got Larry Summers, the President's top economic adviser, speculating recently, "When the economy recovers five years from now, one in six men who are 25 to 54 will not be working." Ouch. While the decline in construction and manufacturing is hurting men in the workforce, expansion of health care and education is helping women. It also helps women that we are traditionally paid less (earning 78% less than men, on average). It's...

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...

Even when we disagree with Larry Summers, we've long thought of him as a better economist than politician. But after reading his nearby letter to the editor, we may have to reverse our judgment. The senior White House aide is abandoning his former economic views to serve the Democratic Party's current political purposes. Earlier this week, we quoted an essay by Mr. Summers published in 1999 in which he explained that unemployment insurance creates an incentive for workers to delay going back to work. The share of America's jobless out of work for 27 weeks or more reached a new...

WASHINGTON may have gotten blizzards last month, but that's nothing compared to the snow job we'll probably get from the Obama administration tomorrow. At 8:30 a.m. the Labor Department will announce the nation's jobs report for February. The experts are expecting another loss -- this time 20,000 jobs compared with the 50,000 positions that disappeared in January. I'm not even going to try to guess whether the experts' predictions will be high or low compared with the announced number. With things like seasonal adjustments, arbitrary guesses on the formation of new companies and millions of temporary census jobs being created...

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...

A senior Obama Administration official almost let the cat out of the bag about the real impact of Obama-style health care "reform." Here's the background. The three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location. In health care, one could argue that it's reimbursements, reimbursements, and reimbursements. One in every six workers receives a paycheck that depends on physician and hospital reimbursement for services. Except for Medicaid, Medicare reimbursement rates are the lowest of all entities that reimburse physicians and hospitals. All private insurance and Medicare Advantage reimbursements are higher than traditional Medicare ones. Medicare and Medicare...

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,"...

<p>As vanishing credit spurred the government-led rescue of dozens of financial institutions, Harvard was so strapped for cash that it asked Massachusetts for fast-track approval to borrow $2.5 billion. Almost $500 million was used within days to exit agreements known as interest-rate swaps that Harvard had entered to finance expansion in Allston, across the Charles River from its main campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.</p>

This past weekend, President Obama’s top economic advisor, Larry Summers, said the “recession is over.” But in the next breath he called for more government action to stimulate the economy, in particular, the pace of hiring. As far as the Administration is concerned, it is government stimulus that brought us this recovery. Now, it’s just a matter of piling on even more government spending to generate job growth. In one sense we agree completely with Mr. Summers. The recession is over. In fact, the economy has been growing since June. This came as no surprise to us. “An economic recovery...