Messina said the president has great trust in Summers. “Larry Summers walked into the administration as the economy went into its worst slide since the Great Depression,” Messina said. “And his advice and actions were absolutely crucial to the president’s decision-making, and those actions helped lead us out of a historical recession.”As I posted yesterday, this is the same man who has recently signed on as an adviser to the King of Austerity himself, the UK's head Tory, David Cameron.
(FYI: Rattner.)#summers The pres supports Summers and so does Steve Rattner. Given the strident left that opposes him on personal attacks, I support him.
— Lanny Davis (@LannyDavis) August 3, 2013
Both anti-Yellen campaigns, then, involve unmistakable sexism, and should be condemned for that reason. As it happens, however, both campaigns have another problem, too: They’re based on bad economic analysis.
In the case of the “female dollar” types, the wrongheadedness of the economics is as raw and obvious as the sexism. The people shouting that the Fed is “debasing the dollar” have been warning of runaway inflation any day now for almost five years, and they have been wrong every step of the way. Worse, they have shown no willingness to admit having been wrong, let alone to revise their views in the face of experience. They are, in short, the last people in the world you should listen to when it comes to monetary policy.
The wrongheadedness of the gravitas crowd, like its sexism, is subtler. But to the extent that having gravitas means something other than being male, it means being what I like to call a Very Serious Person — the kind of person who talks a lot about the need to make tough decisions, which somehow always involves demanding sacrifices on the part of ordinary families while treating the wealthy with kid gloves. And here’s the thing: The Very Serious People have been almost as consistently wrong, although not as spectacularly, as the inflation hysterics.