It is the Federal Reserve System that is the problem, not the person running it.
"Obama suggests possible change at Federal Reserve" by Binyamin Appelbaum | New York Times, June 19, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama suggested he was likely to nominate a new Federal Reserve chairman later this year, saying in a television interview aired late Monday that the current chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, had “already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to.”
Obama praised Bernanke’s leadership of the Fed, which has mounted an aggressive campaign to revive the economy over the last several years. His second term as chairman of the central bank runs through the end of January.
“Well, I think Ben Bernanke has done an outstanding job,” Obama told journalist Charlie Rose on PBS. He added later, “He has been an outstanding partner along with the White House, in helping us recover much stronger than, for example, our European partners, from what could have been an economic crisis of epic proportions.”
If the shape this economy, society, and job market are in is the result of an outstanding job, God help us. Never mind that his whole crew put is in the mess in the first place because of greed.
The president avoided a direct question about whether he would consider reappointing Bernanke. But the interview, taken together with recent comments by Bernanke, reinforces a growing expectation that the administration plans to nominate a new Fed chairman later this year. The nomination would need Senate approval. Only three people have held the position in the last 30 years, and the Obama administration has an opportunity to put a Democrat atop the central bank for the first time since the resignation of Paul Volcker in the late 1980s.
Janet Yellen, the Fed’s vice chairwoman, is widely regarded as a leading candidate. She would become the first woman to head the Fed or any other major central bank. Other possible candidates include two former Obama advisers, Timothy F. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, and Roger Ferguson Jr., former Fed vice chairman.
I notice Geithner got dropped PDQ.
Bernanke will probably face another round of questions about his plans at a news conference Wednesday, following the end of a two-day meeting of the Fed’s policy-making committee.
He has said that he will not attend an annual summer conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., the first time in 25 years that the Fed chairman has skipped the event. Bernanke has made a point throughout his tenure of pushing back against the cult of personality that enshrouded some of his predecessors....
Look in my eyes, what do you see, Bennie?
And now we have a president who thrives on the cult of personality.
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I'm sure there are articles in between, and if I run into anything noteworthy I will update.
"Summers steers clear of controversy" by Deirdre Fernandes | Globe Staff, July 25, 2013
Lawrence Summers, the Harvard professor and former Obama administration official who is reported to have emerged as a front-runner to lead the Federal Reserve, on Wednesday spoke about technological change that could lead to increased unemployment over the next decade, but steered clear of any speculation about his future.
Addressing a conference of economists in Cambridge, Summers, who has generated his share of controversy during his career, tried to avoid any on Wednesday. And that wasn’t a surprise, said Jeffrey Smith, an economics professor at the University of Michigan.
“It was a speech of somebody who understood he’s at risk of being the Fed chairman,” Smith said.
We are the ones at ri$k!
Summers is a former Harvard University president who served as President Obama’s top economic adviser early in the administration and Treasury secretary under President Clinton. He has emerged in several media reports recently as a leading candidate to succeed Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, whose term expires in January.
Obama is said to be considering either Summers or Janet Yellen, the Fed’s vice chairwoman, as Bernanke’s successor.
Summers spoke at a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Cambridge organization of leading academic economists known for dating US recessions. He warned that rapid changes in information technology are disrupting job and wage growth for many Americans. And that the share of working age adults who are employed may continue to decline in the next decade.
Yeah, forget about the insourcing of cheap foreign labor due to accelerate under a piecemeal immigration bill, and the continued outsourcing of American factories and jobs.
Manufacturers are seeing a decline in relative employment, Summers told the economists at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. Companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, and other service providers, including those in the health care sector, are becoming more important. The service sector is likely to account for a growing share of employment, but also require education and skills that many workers may not have.
In other words, you have to go into debt via student loans just to get that shit service job. Unless, you know, you happen to know the right be people or be in an elite class.
He said he didn’t necessarily have all the solutions to these structural economic problems, but stressed that improving educational quality was an important factor....
Then he SHOULD NOT GET the job.
Summers has raised some concerns that the historically low interest rates and other extraordinary measures that the Fed has employed in recent years to stimulate the economy could create new financial bubbles in the economy.
They are ALREADY BLOWN! The current stock market highs and housing market manipulations have done just that!
The Fed has maintained its key short-term interest rate at near zero since the end of 2008. It has also been buying $85 billion a month of Treasury- and mortgage-backed securities as a way to hold down long-term rates, such as mortgages.
In other words, they are handing $85 billion dollars a month to banks to take that bad crap they had to buy back from investors and pensions funds and such and cover the love-peck fines for fraud!
The Fed has indicated that it wants to gradually end that program, but the markets haven’t responded well to that prospect as investors have feared that the economy isn’t strong enough to stand on its own.
That's why prices never really seem to go down, folks. They aren't. Every time he cranks up those printing presses your purchasing power gets weaker. Because the petro-dollar is the underpinning of the Federal Reserve's right to print money, the cost is hidden and covered across all prices as the value of the currency is adjusted. They are buying back the bad assets at this rate because to buy them all back at once would destroy the dollar. It's on its way to being destroyed anyway, but like a frog in pot to be boiled you are feeling pretty good about the temperature of the water.
Summers has some vocal critics, and many have raised questions about whether he would be right choice to guide the country’s monetary policy and implement a financial overhaul.
Summers developed close relationship with members of the Obama administration, with whom he worked during the financial crisis in 2009. And some analysts believe that the president may be more comfortable working with Summers.
Summers is also seen as close to Wall Street, and some analysts have questioned whether he would be the best regulator of financial institutions.
That ought to disqualify him!
During his tenure in the Treasury Department, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which further deregulated the financial industry. Some critics say that led to “too big to fail” banks and contributed to the recent banking crisis....
Not just critics; it is generally acknowledged.
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So who opposes Summers?
"Warren signs letter backing Yellen to lead the Fed" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, July 26, 2013
WASHINGTON — Senator Elizabeth Warren on Friday urged President Obama to appoint Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve, choosing to back Yellen instead of her former Harvard colleague, Larry Summers.
The influential Massachusetts Democrat signed onto a one-page letter circulating among Senate Democrats that calls on Obama to appoint Yellen, who would become the first woman to hold the position. Yellen is currently the Fed’s vice chair, and has worked closely with chairman Ben Bernanke, who is expected to retire when his term ends in January.
Speculation has swirled in Washington this week that the position is down to two front-runners, Yellen and Summers.
Summers is a former top Obama administration adviser who was also treasury secretary under President Clinton. But he is also a voluble presence, known for a tough management style.
Senate Democrats have been circulating a letter that doesn’t mention Summers, but makes a point of praising Yellen — and urging the president to appoint her. The letter has not been made public, and a copy obtained by the Globe did not list signatures. One source estimated that nearly half of the Senate Democrats had signed on.
A Warren spokeswoman confirmed to the Globe late on Friday that the Massachusetts senator had signed it. The state’s other senator, Democrat Edward J. Markey, had not signed, according to his office.
Warren and Summers have a history that has been at times cordial, and at times contentious.
Warren was a professor at Harvard Law School when Summers resigned as Harvard’s president in 2006 for making comments suggesting that gender differences partly explained why fewer women pursued careers in math and science.
They later clashed when Warren was heading a congressional oversight panel.
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Also see:
Summers is too much for Fed to handle
The case for Janet Yellen as the next Fed chairman
Janet Yellen has what it takes to lead the Fed
"Weighing pick for Fed chief, Obama defends Summers" by Mark Landler and Jonathan Weisman | New York Times, August 01, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday offered a strong defense of Lawrence H. Summers as his potential choice to head the Federal Reserve, although he said no final choice had been made.
Speaking to members of the House Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill, Obama said in answer to a “barbed question” from a lawmaker that he believed Summers, a former senior economic adviser to the president, had been maligned in the liberal media, according to Representative Gerald E. Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, who was at the meeting.
Oh, wow, OBAMA ACTUALLY SOUNDS like a REPUBLICAN!!!
Related: GOP committee says NBC, CNN aiding Clinton
To which liberal media were you referring?
According to Connolly, the president described Summers as a rock of stability who deserved credit for helping steer the US economy back from the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing recession. Obama, Connolly said, singled out the negative coverage of Summers in The Huffington Post.
I never read Huffington; it's all agenda-pushing crap. They failed the 9/11 Truth litmus test.
Connolly said the president emphasized he had not made a decision on the next Fed chairman, adding, “I’m not even close to making that choice.” He did not address the criticism of Summers over his record on women’s issues, which have dogged him throughout his career.
There are other things that bother me a hell of a lot more.
Obama did mention another candidate for the job, Janet L. Yellen, and noted he did not know whether there were major policy differences between the candidates. Summers and Yellen have become the subjects of an unusually open campaign by lawmakers and others to try to influence the president’s selection.
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I think the pick has already been made for him.
"Warren, Summers split on economic policy, Fed pick; Paths diverging for two who share many ties" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, August 07, 2013
WASHINGTON — They are two heavyweights of Democratic economic policy, each with strong connections to Harvard University and known for intellectual firepower, each a staunch supporter of President Obama.
But the relationship between Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Lawrence H. Summers, the former Obama economic adviser and treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, is more complicated than their resumes might suggest. And now, in the midst of a fierce personality and policy fight that has gripped Washington in recent weeks, a new chapter in their complex friend-and-foe relationship is being written.
Summers, a former Harvard president, is seeking appointment as the new head of the Federal Reserve — but Warren is openly backing another contender, Janet Yellen, vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve.
Warren’s move turns the tables on their personal history; in 2010, Summers was seen by Warren’s supporters to have joined then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in scuttling Warren’s effort to become head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that was her brainchild.
On the Fed pick, Obama and White House officials are said to be leaning toward Summers, who helped guide Obama out of the depths of the 2008 recession. But the appointment is far from secured, given the enthusiastic support some Democratic senators, Warren among them, are generating for Yellen.
She didn't win on student loans, her new Glass-Steagall is going nowhere....
Both Summers and Warren declined requests for an interview. At the root of their disagreements is a fundamental difference in approach to economic regulation, with Warren placing far more emphasis on everyday taxpayers. Summers has maintained stronger Wall Street ties and has worked as a paid consultant at Citigroup since 2012, the banking company confirmed last month.
And now he will be Fed chief!
As treasury secretary under President Clinton, Summers worked to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, dismantling the wall between commercial banks and many investment activities. Warren and many other observers contend the repeal contributed to the 2008 financial collapse and now, as senator, she is spearheading legislation for a new version of Glass-Steagall.
“She just tends to see things through Main Street and he sees things through Wall Street,” Sheila Bair, a former FDIC chairwoman, said.
“Elizabeth is wary of large institutions and their financial power, and Larry views them as necessary,” she added. “She fears that their market power [risks hurting] the economy.”
Bair knows Warren and Summers, and has at times clashed with Summers. Like Warren, Bair has endorsed Yellen to lead the Fed.
“There’s nothing personal about it,’’ she said of disagreements between Warren and Summers. “This is strictly policy.”
As Warren’s star rose at Harvard law with her expertise in bankruptcies, Summers returned from Washington and took over as the university’s president in 2001. Those who knew them at the time say they rarely had reason to interact — although Warren and her husband would dine regularly with Summers’ successor, Drew Faust, and her husband.
When Summers created an academic firestorm with his suggestion that gender differences contributed to women being less represented in math and science fields, there was no evidence that Warren joined in the calls for him to resign.
People who know her say that comments about women were less likely to upset her than his positions on how the economy should be run.
“I don’t think she’s ever described herself as a feminist,” said Richard Parker, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which studies press and politics. “It’s very much more a class thing than a gender thing as far as I can tell.”
You gotta love that! She may be silent and wanting on NSA spying and foreign policy right now, but sorta knew that going in.
In early 2009, as Congress was trying to craft a legislative response to the financial collapse, Warren saw an opening. She wanted to push her idea of a consumer protection bureau, one designed to protect average Americans.
But although she had advised Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign and helped him conduct a business roundtable in Iowa, she was not a powerful force yet in Washington.
She needed a conduit to the White House, and Summers helped provide that connection.
In April 2009, Warren reportedly spent three hours dining with Summers at the Bombay Club, an Indian restaurant a block from the White House, a meeting that was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. She was pitching her idea about the consumer protection bureau, and she was apparently successful. Summers became an early advocate for the agency....
About two months after the dinner between Warren and Summers, Obama came out in support of the agency. Yet Warren remained a critic of the White House’s post-meltdown approach to bank regulations.
She chaired a congressional oversight panel overseeing the Toxic Asset Relief Program, a bank bailout that started under President George W. Bush and continued under Obama. Warren criticized the Obama administration for not cracking down on big banks, and she compared his advisers — including Summers specifically — unfavorably to a country in South America that decades ago used government funds to try to prevent banks from going under.
“Tim [Geithner] and Larry’s whole plan is just like Argentina in the 1980s,” Warren told author Ron Suskind in September 2009, while he was working on “Confidence Men,” a book on the aftermath of the financial collapse. “There was this giant hole marked ‘Banks’ and the government just dumped money in that hole, as much as they had, while they lied about it. That’s what Larry thinks: that the US is Argentina!”
While Warren and Suskind were waiting at a terminal in Washington’s Reagan National Airport, Warren began to sing, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” Several started to applaud, and she modified the verse, with Summers in the role of Eva Peron.
“Why not?” Warren said with a laugh. “He might understand things better as a woman.”
In March 2010, Warren appeared on PBS’s “The Charlie Rose Show” and said some of Obama’s economic advisers — especially Summers and Geithner — were beholden to Wall Street interests. “I think we have different worldviews,” she said.
She declined to respond to a question of whether they should be in their current jobs.
“Well, I’m going to say it differently,” Warren said. “I think that Summers and Geithner are smart. I think they’re honorable. I think they approach the economy and the world through the largest institutions. And they see the world from a top-down perspective. I spent 25 years somewhere else.”
She noted that she cared about the American middle class and implied that Summers did not.
“It will not save us if a handful of Wall Street banks prosper and the rest of America fails,” she said. “Our focus, our energy, our heart has to be on the rest of America.”
We are there now.
Warren’s increasing outspokenness, and willingness to criticize, rankled many of those on the president’s economic team, according to several sources and insider’s accounts. Publicly, Summers was saying that Warren was well-qualified to head the new consumer protection board.
“Elizabeth Warren, who’s an old friend of mine from our time at Harvard and from whom I have learned an enormous amount, is one of the people who would be a terrific candidate,” Summers said on MSNBC in July 2010, in the days after Congress passed the Dodd-Frank law.
About three weeks later, he and Warren were scheduled for a meeting in the White House. In her quest to lead the consumer board, she had already gained some high-profile backers within the administration, among them senior adviser David Axelrod and Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.
But Summers opposed Warren for the post, according to Warren supporters in and outside the administration, as well as Suskind, who said in his book that Summers grew irritated when Romer threw her support behind Warren.
It's called being a two-faced f***!
During the meeting at the White House, which Suskind recounted, Summers arrived late, disheveled. He asked a few questions and departed abruptly to go take a call.
The next day, in the Oval Office, Obama told Warren he was not going to nominate her to lead the agency, instead naming her a “special assistant to the president’’ to help get the bureau running.
Summers apparently hasn’t publicly described his role in the matter; a Summers spokeswoman would not comment.
Obama went on to nominate Richard Cordray, the attorney general of Ohio, as the bureau’s first permanent chief. It took two years before he was confirmed by the Senate.
Nearly three years after her meeting with Obama, Warren held a seat in the Senate, having defeated Republican Scott Brown in the most high-profile Senate race of 2012. Months later, buzz began building about whether Obama would nominate Summers to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, to replace Ben Bernanke.
Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat of Ohio, collected signatures for a letter drafted to the president backing Yellen, the Fed vice chairman. The letter did not mention Summers. Without elaborating, Warren added her name to the list.
A few weeks before she signed the letter, she said on Bloomberg TV that Summers and Yellen are well qualified.
“In that sense, we’re really lucky,” she said. “We’ve got really smart, talented people who can serve in that position.”
But when asked if Summers could get confirmed in the Senate — the very question that dragged Warren’s stature down in her quest to lead the consumer protection bureau — she gave pause.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
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It's a blood feud.
"Senator? Senator? If it’s in a Senate hallway, Elizabeth Warren rarely answers" by Noah Bierman and Matt Viser | Globe Staff, August 02, 2013
WASHINGTON — It is one of the quainter rituals in an era when the people in power are increasingly removed from the people they most affect, often talking through staff members in written statements or during heavily choreographed events. Most senators typically stop on their way to and from floor votes and committee hearings, and partake in the unthinkable: They answer the questions they are asked....
And there’s freshman Senator Elizabeth Warren....
She’ll either huddle close to a Senate colleague, breezing past several reporters as if they don’t exist, or use a variety of other methods to avoid hallway questions. There’s the tricky cellphone to her ear maneuver, the more athletic dash for the elevator, the outright sprint to catch a departing tram.
I think she has offended them.
Warren’s office has said the senator has a general policy of not responding to questions in the halls of the Senate, a decision that has put her at odds with the vast majority of her more senior colleagues, and one that has come to oddly color a celebrity newcomer who was once the Oklahoma state debating champion, a Harvard professor who has challenged the nation’s most prominent bankers, and traded quips and jabs on the late-night television circuit.
It may not be earth-shattering, or even important, but it is unusual.
Thus it gets front-page treatment.
Warren’s one-term predecessor as a senator from Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown, would frequently stop in the hallways for interviews when he first arrived in Washington, although he became far more taciturn over time. During his stint in the Senate, John Kerry also would often engage with reporters.
“Every senator will make his or her own decision on how to handle this,” Warren said Thursday in the hallway, during a rare exception to her rule, after declining prior attempts to discuss the issue. “But I want to be able to talk about the issues in depth, and I don’t think that works very well in the hallway.”
Warren is known for smart performances in one-on-one news media interviews, often getting the better of financial reporters trying to undermine her proposals. But she is less comfortable when fielding multiple questions during general press conferences.
The scene in the halls of Congress makes a press conference look serene.
It can resemble the floor action of a frenzied commodities market, as knots of reporters jockey for position around a single senator, asking rapid-fire questions in random order.
Yes, the intrepid Washington press corp
“What do you think about the Syrian civil war?”
“Have you taken a position on the House border security bill?”
The fate of the free world is not always at stake.
“What are your plans for the summer vacation?” one reporter asked every senator he could find on a recent day.
Competition for scraps of information and incremental news developments, the fodder of blogs and tweets, has only intensified with the proliferation of up-to-the-minute political and single-subject websites. The intense scrutiny correspondingly raises the stakes for any gaffes or misstatements....
Warren usually fields questions from her home state reporters when traveling in Massachusetts, and she has occasionally made exceptions for Massachusetts-based reporters in the hall. But generally she instructs reporters to call her office to set up an appointment.
Since she entered the Senate as a national figure, she has tried to avoid the appearance of upstaging more senior members of the clubby, tradition-bound environment with many hierarchical rules — both written and unwritten.
Does she have an actual office now?
She has sought, in Senate parlance, to be a workhorse, not a showhorse. She appears more comfortable choreographing her message through floor speeches, press releases, and direct e-mails to her supporters.
Warren’s policy of holding her tongue began on her first trip to Washington as senator-elect when, while walking with a colleague, she spotted a group of reporters and was overheard whispering, “Pretend you’re talking to me.”
Yeah, Liz Warren is a little liar!
Several of her colleagues are known to avoid reporters, including Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican who has avoided corridor interviews since he was identified as a client of a prostitution service in 2007, and Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat known best as a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member.
Barack Obama, when he arrived at the Senate as a celebrity lawmaker from Illinois, was often far more accessible making the long walk between the Hart Senate Office Building to the Capitol than at any other venue. Even Hillary Clinton, who had Secret Service protection as the spouse of a former president, was known to stop for questions at least some of the time.
Even thought the Clinton's are wealthy you paid for the security, taxpayers.
Fledgling Senator Edward J. Markey frequently assented to hallway interviews as a member of the House of Representatives, and appears to be sticking with that policy in his new role. On the day Markey was sworn in last month, his wife and press secretary tried to hustle him away from reporters.
“No,” he interrupted them. “I can handle this.”
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Ah, Globe got away.
