Bloomberg (et al) report that President Obama is considering naming Larry Summers head of the World Bank when Robert Zoellick ends his term later this year.

While a Summers nomination may draw criticism from some Democrats who disagree with his past stances on deregulating the financial industry, he has support inside the administration from top officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and current NEC Director Gene Sperling, said one of the people.

Which is to say that Summers has the support of Goldman Sachs, which has close relationships with and/or invested heavily in those two men.

And why not? Ever since Summers “saved the world” in the currency crises of the 1990s, he has been a strong advocate of putting the interests of creditors ahead of those of working people.

Would Summers make a good head of the World Bank? I doubt it. After all, the lesson of every management situation Summers has ever been in is that he’s a terrible manager. (And Ron Susskind’s book supports the thesis that Summers really didn’t change at all after his disastrous stint as Harvard president.)

As the very good Reuters blogger Felix Salmon writes, management is kinda important at the World Bank.

You also need to be an almost superhuman manager. The World Bank has more than 10,000 employees from over 160 countries, with offices in more than 100 countries around the world. The range of cultural expectations they bring to their jobs is truly enormous, and the amount of political jostling and mutual incomprehension which results is entirely predictable. In order to manage this rabble, you need a very high level of cultural and interpersonal sensitivity.

Sounds like Larry Summers to a T, right?

My concern with Summers has always been that someone would mistake his formidable talents for leadership and place him at the top of an un-democratic organization—the Fed, for instance. Or the World Bank. Putting Summers at the head of an immensely powerful but little understood and not-very-transparent organization is exactly the wrong way to use his skills.

Is Summers confirmable (as he would have to be, by the World Bank’s executive board)?

“Larry is controversial,” said Erskine Bowles, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff. “Anything you appoint Larry to, you know there are going to be some people who are going to take shots at him. But you know he’s a brilliant economist, which I think everybody recognizes.”

That last line is a wonderful example that if you just say something enough, eventually people will believe it. (Sort of the foundation of modern American politics, really.) Because, while that description of Summers as a “brilliant economist” is so liberally used people have come to take it for granted, a survey of Summers’ success in policymaking doesn’t particularly support it. Summers has a very powerful mind, no question about that; I marvel at his ability to absorb and retain and deploy massive amounts of information.

And yet—when one looks at his record, what exactly has that powerful mind been right about over the years? (Hello, repeal of Glass-Steagal…)

And I think you also have to wonder about Summers’ cozy relationship with the financial industry. No one’s watching this now that Summers is a private citizen, but how much buck-raking is he doing these days?

The Susskind book is fascinating on the subject of Summers, and I’ll write about that shortly.