Larry Summers.
Is bewildered.
My podcast partner Joe Klein and I interviewed Larry Summers on Tuesday. He has an impossibly impressive resume, which begins as follows:
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers is one of America’s leading economists. In addition to serving as 71st Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, Dr. Summers served as Director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama Administration, as President of Harvard University, and as the Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Dr. Summers’ tenure at the U.S. Treasury coincided with the longest period of sustained economic growth in U.S. history. He is the only Treasury Secretary in the last half century to have left office with the national budget in surplus. Dr. Summers has played a key role in addressing the major financial crisis for the last three decades.
We asked Larry to walk us through the Trump administration’s economic policy (or policies) and why he thinks they won’t work. We also talked to him about how CEOs might navigate the current “economic environment”. Those two subjects comprise the first half of this podcast.
The second half is devoted to the Trump administration’s assault on some of the nation’s leading academic institutions, including Harvard, and what the fight is all about.
Because Larry is on the board of directors of OpenAI, we ended by asking him about the present and the future of artificial intelligence.
It’s a fascinating hour. He’s one smart guy.
‘Night Owls’ interview with Larry Summers. Recorded on Tuesday, 22 April 2025.
Summers acts as if the case for tariffs is beneath contempt, but of Trump's tariff advocates hold PhD's from Harvard. What's going on here?
Thanks, Flash. I am sitting here listening to Summers list the four fallacies that lie beneath Trump's tariffs and wondering where Miran and Navarro were the day that lecture was given.