The Federal Reserve Succession
Pedro da Costa and Mark Felsenthal:
Opposition mounts to Summers as possible Fed chief: Supporters of Summers argue he should have an edge given his crisis-management experience. "When there is consensus, who the Fed chair is hardly matters, and the times when it matters are the times when you have to think outside the box, and then his strengths shine," said Brad DeLong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked with Summers in the Clinton Treasury Department.
What I gave them, in full:
"Larry Summers was a great administrative success at the Treasury--he hit the sweet spot in terms of good new ideas, analytical power, making a stolid bureaucracy move, and still keeping everybody in the building happy enough to stay on the same page. A lot of credit goes to Larry. A lot goes to the right staff which enabled his strengths to blossom and enabled him to hit the sweet spot--people like Michelle Smith at communications, Sheryl Sandberg as chief-of-staff, Eizenstat, Shafer, Geithner, and Truman as deputies, and so on.
"My view is that Summers has the proper policy views for Fed Chair, and I have a narrow preference for Summers over other candidates like Janet Yellen and Alan Blinder with similar policy views--in large part because when there is consensus who the Fed Chair is hardly matters, and the times when it matters are the times when you have to think outside-the-box and then his strengths shine."
