Really, Larry?

By J. Thomas Duffy 

People in glass houses... 

Former Government and Harvard hack Larry Summers is in the news again today.

No, he isn't bellowing some inane financial wisdom, rather dissing two of the original Facebook founders, the Twinkletoes Twins, or whatever their name is: 

Larry Summers calls Winklevoss twins 'A**holes' 

One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an a**hole. This was the latter case.

 

Ha-ha-ha, what a funny guy you are, Larry.

Or as Ryan Tate at Gawker states, "Everyone at the money conference laughed, which means Summers has successfully found two people who are somehow even less popular than he is." 

One thing people didn't laugh at, and you didn't learn, as a "college president" was managing your university's endowment, as Felix Salmon detailed in his "How Larry Summers lost Harvard $1.8 billion" a few years ago.

I second Naomi Klein's call, "Why We Should Banish Larry Summers From Public Life": 

I vote to banish Larry Summers. Not from the planet. That wouldn't be nice. Just from public life...

And this brings us to a central and often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles. This is the process wherein the intelligence of an inarguably intelligent person is inflated and valued beyond all reason, creating a dangerous accumulation of unhedged risk. Larry Summers is the biggest Brain Bubble we've got.

Brain Bubbles start with an innocuous "whiz kid" moniker in undergrad, which later escalates to "wunderkind." Next comes the requisite foray as an economic adviser to a small crisis-wracked country, where the kid is declared a "savior." By 30, our Bubble Boy is tenured and officially a "genius." By 40, he's a "guru," by 50 an "oracle." After a few drinks: "messiah."

***** 

And that's the problem with Larry. For all his appeals to absolute truths, he has been spectacularly wrong again and again. He was wrong about not regulating derivatives. Wrong when he helped kill Depression-era banking laws, turning banks into too-big-to-fail welfare monsters. And as he helps devise ever more complex tricks and spends ever more taxpayer dollars to keep the financial casino running, he remains wrong today. 

It was funnier, Larry, when you used to sleep through meetings.

 

And, as far as Facebook goes, what is much, much more funnier was Twitter's Biz Stone's turn on "Wait Wait ...Don't Tell Me" last weekend. 

BEN SIDRAN - Blue Daniel

(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)