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Former White House economic adviser and Treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers has withdrawn his name as a candidate for Federal Reserve chairman, a person familiar with the matter said Sunday. President Obama had been strongly considering naming Summers to the post after their long experience fighting the financial crisis and recession. The decision may mean that another top candidate, current Federal Reserve vice chairman Janet Yellen, will get the job, or another candidate. In a letter dated Sunday to the president, Summers wrote that he was withdrawing his name. “It has been a privilege to work with you since the

Former Treasury Secretary Calls Obama, Cites 'Acrimonious' Coming Confirmation

U.S. President Barack Obama will name former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Japan's Nikkei newspaper said on Friday. The newspaper, quoting unnamed sources, said in its original Japanese version that Obama was "in the final stages" and moving toward naming Summers. The English-language version said the president "is set to" name Summers as early as late next week. Debate in Washington has focused on whether Obama will pick Summers or Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen to succeed Ben Bernanke, whose term as head of the U.S. central bank expires in January. The appointment must...

Japan’s Nikkei is reporting that President Obama is going to nominate Administration insider Lawrence Summers as Federal Reserve Chairman. Summers would replace current Chair Ben Bernanke. This nomination is in spite of the total lack of experience of Summmers in the Federal Reserve system. What experience does Summers have? 1. He was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan in 1982–1983. 2. Summers served as an economic adviser to the Dukakis Presidential campaign in 1988 which ended in disaster. dukakis 3. He served as Chief Economist for the World Bank until 1993. 4. He served...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may be stepping down when his term expires in January. If that happens, President Obama gets to nominate his successor. The leading candidates are Fed Vice Chair Janet Yellen and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Both Yellen and Summers are from elite, liberal universities (University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University, respectively). Both are similar to Bernanke in terms of policies. Yellen is quiet and Summers is … well, Summers – quite opinionated. It is doubtful that other respected candidates like Jeff Lacker at the Richmond Fed or Thomas M. Hoenig from the Kansas...

The White House official whom Bob Woodward charged had crosssed a line by saying he would "regret" printing his version of a set of Washington negotiations was Gene Sperling, the director of the White House Economic Council, a source familiar with the exchange told BuzzFeed Wednesday. The email from Sperling to Woodward, which Woodward read to Politico Wednesday, has transfixed Washington, with Republicans and some in the press charging that it embodies a White House lording it over a cowed press corps. Woodward, Politico reported, called the top official — identified to BuzzFeed as Sperling — to tell him that...

PORTLAND, Maine — Angus King’s campaign called on the state’s TV stations Monday to pull two Republican ads from the air that it says offer an inaccurate and misleading portrayal of King’s involvement in a 22-turbine wind project in the western Maine town of Roxbury. King and business partner Rob Gardiner held a 10 percent stake in the project until early 2011. At a Monday news conference, King campaign manager Kay Rand said the campaign is filing formal complaints with the TV stations airing the ads claiming that the stations are required to remove the ads under federal law. “Initially,...

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is out with another ad targeting Angus King and his wind energy business. The spot, titled “Smooth Operator,” asks, “Angus King got a sweetheart deal for his windmills. What did Mainers get?” The spot then features five unidentified residents from the area of the 22-turbine Record Hill wind project in which King and business partner Rob Gardiner held a 10 percent stake until January 2011. They accuse King of profiting from a wind turbine installation that’s changed the area where they live. “‘We all need to get used to seeing turbines where we used to...

Angus King isn't worried about issues affecting middle class Mainers. King said, "When I'm Campaigning, nobody talks to me about health care or even the economy." Who is King talking to?

The 30-second ad portrays King as a free-spending liberal, calling him the "king of spending," while Maine's former governor says the ads are negative attacks by outside money "trying to influence Maine voters." PORTLAND, Maine (AP) _ The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has begun airing TV ads in Maine taking on independent Senate candidate Angus King. The 30-second ad portrays King as a free-spending liberal during his years as Maine's governor, calling him the "king of spending.'' The ad says government spending skyrocketed under King, and that he left the state with a billion-dollar shortfall when he left office. King...

Friction about the roles of women in the Obama White House grew so intense during the first two years of the presidentÂ’s tenure that he was forced to take steps to reassure senior women on his staff that he valued their presence and their input. At a dinner in November 2009, several senior female aides complained directly to the president that men enjoyed greater access to him and often muscled them out of key policy discussions. Those tensions prompted Obama, urged on by senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, to elevate more women into senior White House positions, recognize them more during...

A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. Suskind states that Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in his administration while noting that restructuring the financial system was complicated and could have resulted in deeper financial harm....

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...

(01-07) 09:56 PST WASHINGTON (AP) -- He has helped write popular television dramas and has stroked many a sweet drop shot on the tennis court. He has written a book about education in developing countries. And now, for the second time in his career, Gene Sperling, never formally educated as an economist, will rise to one of the top economic posts in the U.S. government. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/01/07/national/w095619S04.DTL#ixzz1AZ8gAdm6

When Larry Summers was president of Harvard, a woman by the name of Iris Mack was fired from Harvard Capital Management. The problem with this? A month before she was fired she sent Summers an email warning him about the quality of the portfolio managers at HMC and also about the dangerous derivatives positions that HMC was taking on that ultimately resulted in huge losses for Harvard. {snip] The story of Summers' mismanagement of Harvard's finances appears to be a story that won't seem to die. Most recently showcased by Bloomberg. Now focus appears to be picking up on Mack,...

Raising $100 billion a year of climate finance by 2020 is challenging, but possible through mechanisms including carbon markets, domestic carbon taxes and a variety of international transportation taxes, a United Nations advisory group said in a report Friday. Earlier this year, the UN's Ban established the panel, which includes U.S. National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, billionaire financier George Soros and Deutsche Bank vice-chairman Caio Koch-Weser. The financing will be used to support mitigation and adaptation efforts in developing countries--in particular, for the poorest and most vulnerable communities.

President Barack Obama, taping Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, gave a shout-out to Lawrence Summers – one the outgoing director of the White House National Economic Council probably could have done without. Mr. Summers did “a heckuva job,” Mr. Obama said. Mr. Stewart quickly admonished: “You don’t want to use that phrase, dude.” The reference, of course, was to former President George W. Bush’s praise of then-FEMA director Michael Brown’s management of Hurricane Katrina relief efforts – a job widely considered bungled.

A day after President Obama declared that his administration is not “some academic exercise,” Lawrence Summers announced plans to step down as director of the president’s National Economic Council and return to Harvard University. Christina Romer just left her post as head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to go back to the University of California, Berkeley. The current administration has suffered from a historic lack of private-sector experience,

Summers is out at end of year. I heard he wanted to extend the tax cuts to everyone, and Obama the commie was against it. Summers has been partially on target, but mostly he's still a Keynesian and water carrier. Atlantic Monthly says Obama shouldn't get an ex-CEO to be his financial advisor...duh, like the blue blood lib mag is gonna say differently. I say Obama will put another PhD there to theorize because he's too arrogant and hateful to do otherwise. He thinks he just didn't have the right person to the post to make his beliefs become reality.

"Ideas may be cut loose from experience in two senses: either they have no roots in experience, or they are not submitted to the test of experience. Either way, they are free to be foolish." So wrote Jeane Kirkpatrick in the Introduction to her landmark book, Dictatorships and Double Standards (New York, 1982, p. 10). Kirkpatrick's statement applies perfectly to the band of naïve idealists now in change of our government. The youthful dreamers guiding the Obama administration have almost no private-sector experience. Like Obama himself, the Cabinet and host of czars who direct policy have spent their lives in...