YouSaid · the spoken record

Larry Summers

lines on the record: 40
first: 2023-04-20
most recent: 2023-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You know, I think it's always best to let other people judge one's legacy. I've tried to think clearly about problems to speak candidly about problems and to point the way towards how to make the best progress with respect to the many challenges we face.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was very satisfied by all the experiences that I've had. In Washington, and I think right now, trying to think about in more fundamental ways about the problem and speaking in the relatively free ways that one can speak when you're only speaking for yourself. Is what I will find most satisfying and impactful.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm very happily ensconced as a professor who tries to participate in the public debates by engaging in dialogues with people like you.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure that I would accept that characterization. I think we're likely to have a successful agreement, and I'd be surprised if it came with extensive fiscal measures. I hope we'll get both, but I hope we'll get them unlinked rather than linked, because I think it would be a terrible precedent. Look, taking hostages and kidnapping people and demanding ransom in the form of change is the wrong thing to do. Even if what you want from your hostage taking has some reason and logic in it. And this debt ceiling thing is a kind of kidnapping and hostage taking.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that in a democracy, fear does the work of reason. I think you need to not prematurely negotiate. And I think eventually reason will prevail, but it will require a bit more alarm than we have now. I think the administration is playing this about right.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think there are some things you just have to not negotiate about. My kids sometimes spend more money than I wish they did. And we discuss whether they're going to pay or whether I'm going to pay, but we don't discuss whether the families should default to the visa organization. And that's how I feel here. I don't think the idea of defaulting on the debt associated with spending we've already done should be on the table. And I think we do need more serious bipartisan discussion about containing the rate at which the government is borrowing going forward. But I think linkage between the two is really very unhelpful.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not with the zealots on either side of this. I wouldn't have divested from fossil fuels as the head of a major institution. But I think that part of what makes our system great is that different people make a range of different choices. And I think Peter Thiel and Vivek are free to invest their money as they see fit. I'm not sure they should be quite as angry at others who choose to make investment choices on a different basis. Pluralism, it seems to me, has a lot to recommend it.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bringing you in. That's why they Don't know. I certainly, I've had a policy, Kara, that I never engage in public advocacy on the part of any company I have an involvement with. And I never contact public officials on the part of any company that I'm involved with. And I say to them that if what they want is such wisdom and experience as I'm able to provide without any fiduciary responsibility, that I'm sometimes prepared to offer, but I at least try to always present myself as not in a position of warranting or vouching for any institution. You shouldn't wear I don't take on work as an employee or as a fiduciary of some kind”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do I regret having put myself in positions where I didn't have fiduciary responsibility but did provide some advice and had an opportunity to have at least a second row seat and learn about what was going on? No, I think I probably would have made those decisions if I had it to do over again. Do I have an assessment with respect to any particular entity? No, I don't, I'm not in a position, don't have the knowledge to judge any particular entity. I would be quite surprised if there wasn't some residue from all of this innovation that Proved to be quite important, and I would be even more surprised if there wasn't a very large amount of shaking out. But that's always the way it is in market economies with new technologies”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that if Look at almost anything in its early stage, whether it's the automobile industry, whether it's the application of electricity, whether it's the internet, there are a lot of drifters and grifters who are in it. And that's certainly true of crypto. There were drifters and grifters in the early stages of innovation. And I think the question is how this will all play out. I think government has made more errors of being too slow to regulate than it has of being too rapid to regulate. I think a substantial fraction of what people have been excited about will shake out.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a real risk from here. And I think there's stag and there's flation and there's stagflation. When I say that I think a soft landing is unlikely, that's a statement that I think it's very likely that we'll get at least one of stag or inflation. where inflation is right now and given the downwards pressures on the economy, I certainly think stagflation is a meaningful risk right now and it's probably a risk that's underpriced in the markets.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining, not when it's raining, the right time to debate the structure of the fire department is not during the fire, but is after the fire has been put out. So I think we've got a lot of thinking we should be doing now about the financial system, about what kinds of buffers banks are required to have. In general, Kara, I think the philosophy we need is one of not trying to make everybody smart, but instead trying to make the system safe for when people are stupid. You know, if you look at auto accidents in our country, we were making no progress really in the 50s and 60s when we had a driver's ed paradigm.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this would have been a one-week run rather than a two-day run without the Twitter. That institution was fundamentally insolvent and fundamentally insolvent institutions need to be resolved. And when they're fairly big institutions, that can't take place without sending shockwaves that then affect financial stability more generally.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the above bank management number one, supervisors and regulators number two, the broad framework. Number three, tech companies and their venture capitalists, number four.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the world needed was more regulation of regional banks, not less. And the Trump administration supported by its designate on the Fed with responsibility for regulation, Randy Quarles were always working to reduce the regulation of banks when things should have been moving in the other way. Would it have mattered? I'm not sure it would have, but it's better to be moving in the right direction.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such as why are the bondholders of the holding company getting paid off in a significant way? And it certainly could have been caught much earlier and it would have been much less painful if it had been caught earlier.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Foreign workers and foreign companies. One way I like to say it is that I think the best generals are the ones who hate war the most, but recognize that it sometimes needs to be fought. And I think something similar is true about industrial policy advocates. The best ones know that it's sometimes necessary but really like markets better. And frankly, I think we have too much enthusiasm for the idea in the current moment where people just like any rationale for the government getting involved in planning, directing, managing every aspect of the economy.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More general wish lists. So I think we should have supported the semiconductor industry in ways that focused on semiconductors and let the companies figure out whether childcare was an important aspect of their recruitment strategy or not. I think that we should not be engaged in telling people where their electric cars that they are going to get a tax credit for need to be produced. I think we set back the cause of promoting our industry when we impose various requirements that wages be high. I think when we restrict technology, we need to make sure that there's a strong general national security rationale for it. Than just a desire to help American companies or American workers vis- ⁇-vis.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that government has long an important role. You go back to Abraham Lincoln and the transcontinental railroad and you go back to the land grant colleges, you go back to DARPA and the internet. So I thought that basically supporting the dissemination of clean green technologies was the right thing to do. And that's why I urged Senator Mansion and others to support the IRA. I am worried when these programs are not just about particular objectives like helping to fight climate change or promoting resilience, but become”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think in both cases, it probably depends less on the level than the rate of change. That is, a weak economy that is growing is probably better than a strong economy that is contracting. A more elevated rate of inflation that is clearly coming down is probably better than a lower rate of inflation that is in the process of rising. There's an old political observation, Kara, that 100% of the people pay rising prices and only 6% of the people are unemployed. And so inflation is particularly salient.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's going to be really important for them to be credible, but they're not going to be completely credible because they're always optimistic. But again, I don't sit where they sit with all the pressures that they're facing. So I use the words I've been surprised rather than make confident statements that they've been making a mistake.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economic success depends on confidence, and when you're in public life, it's always tempting to try to infuse confidence into the situation, because if you're not optimistic, who will be. On the other hand, I think one always has to think as a public official about not just how one's words sound today, but how they may sound three or six months hence. I've been surprised by how optimistic the Biden administration and its various spokespeople have chosen to be. And I think they've cost themselves some real credibility with consistent optimistic forecasts, and there may come a time when the truth is optimistic.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“where the GDP is actually declining, where corporate profits decline. We've had more than a dozen of them since the Second World War. We very much want not to have them, but it's not that it's the end of the world if we do. I think that what would be a terrible mistake would be to be so squeamish about the possibility of recession that we allowed a high rate of inflation to become built into expectations because then ultimately it's like what happens when you ignore any illness, the treatment that's necessary when you've put it off much too long tends to be much more painful, difficult and with lower prospects of success.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Late impacts of the monetary policies we've engaged in, the rethinking that has to be going on in banks across the country in the wake of SVB, the need to make sure that we're not providing too much liquidity in the economy at a time when money is losing its value quite rapidly, that all of that leads to a downturn and it's very hard to hit the brake hard in a completely controlled way. And so the economy goes into recession, not the kind of recession we saw during the financial crisis or after COVID, but the kind of recession where the unemployment rate gets up to somewhere near six, where there's a period of several quarters.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we've got to be realistic. We don't know what the future is going to hold and we don't know the exact effects of the instruments that we're using. The Fed's job is a little bit like one's task when one is in an old hotel. In an old hotel, there's a lag between the time you turn the faucet in the shower and the time, the temperature of the water changes. And it's very hard to avoid scalding yourself or freezing yourself as you adjust and nothing happens. And then you keep adjusting. I think the Fed's challenge is a little bit like that. If we're very fortunate, we will find our way to a soft landing. The more likely outcome, it seems to me, is that some combination of the delay”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kara, rather than a politics and economics of envy. And I think that's the distinction that we have to draw. And when I hear people who are always framing it in terms of their indignation about the success of others, I see it too much in those cases as being a matter of envy.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think they are on to a legitimate source of unhappiness, but I don't think. Does one think that America has too many people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Sergei Bryn? Or does one think it would be even better if we had more people who created world-leading institutions like the ones those people created? And I think the answer is that I wish we had more hugely successful entrepreneurs creating world-leading institutions that produce transformative new opportunities for consumers. I think we do need to work harder than we do to make sure that they pay their fair share in taxes. I think of myself as very progressive, but I believe in a politics and in economics of opportunity.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do, and that's why one of the things I've worked very hard on is a range of proposals, including the corporate minimum tax that was just put into place in the IRA to make sure that we're fully taxing corporations. And so recycling profits back for the benefit of ordinary citizens. That's why I focused a lot of my work on the various uses of information technology around strengthening the IRS, because I think it's sort of beyond belief that the computers we use to check on the tax integrity of the wealthiest people in our country use COBOL as their programming language. So I'm all for doing things that work. But I think we need to be practical.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Show up in higher profits, but there's no good way to reduce the profits and reduce prices while keeping the economy functioning. The last time we had the idea in a major way that we could combat inflation by containing prices directly was when Richard Nixon had that idea in 1971. And it did in a certain sense work in the short run. It won him the 1972 presidential election by a very wide margin, but the ultimate consequences were pretty catastrophic for the economy.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think so. I think that the right way to understand it is that business hotels make more money during the week than they do on weekends because there's more demand. Resorts do better on weekends than they do during weekdays because there's more demand. We push demand way up and the consequence of pushing demand way up was that when demand equaled supply prices were much higher and that led to higher profits. I don't think having price controls would have been a very good strategy. It just would have created shortages and all kinds of evasion. If you pump up demand beyond capacity, what you're going to get is rising prices. And yes, that is going to”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hope not. I think that the idea of price stability, people aren't thinking about inflation all the time is something that's immensely important to helping the economy function. I think when you have inflation, people like you and I are better able to protect ourselves from it than the vast majority of Americans. So I would prefer to see us remain a low inflation economy and that's certainly been Jay Powell's repeated commitment over the last year. And it seems to me we have enough doubts about public institutions in our country without this much repeated goal by a very important institution being abandoned.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you maintain confidence best by measuring your pronouncements with your degree of knowledge. And there's an ever-present temptation to provide confidence in the immediate run by providing specificity and firm, clear statements. But it's a very short-run bit of candy because when the statements turn out to be wrong, as they inevitably will, your credibility is undermined.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This credit crunch coming from the banking side that's doing some of the work of interest rate increases, it's possible that we'll have had enough after May, but that's a judgment we're just going to have to hang on every economic statistic.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one knows, and in a way, I think the mistake that they have tended to make is making overly confident pronouncements and forecasts which turn out to be wrong. And then undermine their credibility. I think the Fed probably needs to learn the lesson of the Delphi Oracles. The Delphi Oracles understood that they were human, that they didn't know the future, and they therefore kept their pronouncements a bit vague and oracular. No dot plots for Delphi. And I'm not sure dot plots laying out specific scenarios are the right mode of communication for the Fed. I certainly think we're a substantial part of the way through, large part of the way through the necessary tightening. If there were not a credit crunch at a banking set of issues, I would feel that the Fed needed to engage in three, perhaps a little more than that, more tightenings, given that we have”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a longstanding policy that I don't speak to public officials' motives. I don't speculate on what they were not doing internally. And I just try to focus my observations on the economic issues.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's much easier to make observations from the cheap seats than it is to be in the job and sitting with the responsibility of speaking on economic issues for the president. That affects what one is able to say and assess.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think SVB and inflation are linked in two ways. One is they're just both big problems that got missed. And the other is that if we had dealt more promptly with inflation, we wouldn't have had the kind of dramatic spike in interest rates that we had that then led to the difficulties at SHVB. Janet was my teacher in graduate school. I've got great respect for her. I don't think she was as quick as she might have been to recognize the magnitude of the inflation threat in her public comment. I think that she's probably been as optimistic as anybody in Washington this week about the economic future. And I'm not sure that a harder landing than she expects isn't what's likely. But look.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there hasn't been enough of that at the Fed over the years, at the IMF, for example, which in some ways is a global central bank after they have had problematic episodes with respect to missing aspects of the financial crisis with respect to very large loans to Argentina that proved to have been unwarranted. They have written really very thoughtful reports trying to learn and distill the lessons of those episodes.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What may be an excessive tendency to complacent groupthink within the fed. I've got huge respect for the individuals involved, but I do think that after errors of this magnitude, institutional reflection is appropriate. Much like the military does after a failed military action, or much like is done at an airline by the FAA after a air safety failure.”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the Fed made a big mistake in not recognizing the inflation threat going back to 2021, and they stuck with the error for much too long. And when an institution makes a serious mistake with respect to its core mission, it needs to reflect. Was it an intellectual issue? Was it an issue of particular people? Was it an issue of culture? and lack of diversity. And I think they need to do that with respect to the inflation error. In some ways, they compounded that error by not acting on SVB soon enough and allowing that to become a problem that had to be declared a broad systemic problem. So I think they need to reflect on”
2023-04-20 · On with Kara Swisher · Larry Summers on the Politics & Economics of Envy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT