deregulation and currency policy

Economists Behaving Badly, Redux by Krugman

Brad DeLong asks why the left views Larry Summers as a right-wing hyena. I think that’s a straw man, or maybe a straw hyena. What is true is that a lot of people even on the moderate left don’t trust Summers, even though much of his commentary over the years has been very much center-left — and since leaving office he has become one of our most prominent fiscal doves. 

Where does this mistrust come from? Well, let me give you an example: Jackson Hole, 2005, a conference dedicated to celebrating the record of, ahem, Alan Greenspan. Raghuram Rajan had presented a paper warning that the risks of financial instability were much higher than most people were acknowledging. (I think Rajan has been wrong on many issues since then, but that was certainly a prophetic paper). And the response, in general, took the form of ridicule. 

The principal discussant was Don Kohn (pdf), who was (barely) polite but completely wrong-headed, celebrating financial innovations such as “the growing ease of housing equity extraction”:
 

Leading off on the rest of the discussion (pdf) was Larry Summers, who wasn’t polite, dismissing Rajan for being “slightly Luddite” in questioning the value of financial innovation, which he compared (in a really bad analogy) to technological progress in transportation. 

Now, lots of people got this stuff wrong — although you want to bear in mind that we’re not talking about the 1990s now, we’re talking about 2005. And we all make mistakes. But have either Summers or Kohn ever acknowledged that they got it wrong, and explained why? 

And you can see, I think, why “the left” — while not, in fact, viewing Summers as a hyena — is a bit upset that the only people President Obama has mentioned as alternatives to Janet Yellen are Summers and Kohn. 

Larry Summers and Financial Crises: Is He Being Graded on Attendance? by Dean Baker