Larry Summers: “Don’t Embarrass Yourself By Arguing with Me”
Posted on January 24th, 2014 in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
Here’s a great catch from Jacob Weisberg at Davos.
In discussion with English Chancellor George Osborne, Larry Summers said, “You blew it on stimulating the UK recovery. Don’t embarrass yourself by arguing with me about it.”
Or, as the BBC put it, “There was some disagreement during the session with former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers….”
Now that he’s not up for Fed chair, is the contentious, impolitic, arrogant Larry Summers of old reemerging? Let’s hope so. He’s much more fun that way.
Update: Thanks to the commenters who pointed out that Weisberg subsequently tweeted that the tweet above was a “facetious” characterization of Summers’ words. I’m disappointed, but also a little irritated; there’s absolutely nothing in that tweet that suggests it’s not a quote. (For one thing, it’s in quotation marks.) In any event, I’m glad to correct the record.
7 Responses
1/24/2014 10:40 pm
This actually gives me a warm feeling, it’s so familiar. You’re right, he’s back.
1/25/2014 9:01 am
What Osborne should have said: Larry, it is you who blew it on simulating the US recovery. All the stimulation did was make your friends on Wall Street richer than they would have been.
1/26/2014 9:35 am
Interesting that it was a Brit that brought out the real Summers. My first experience pretty much was when i was chairing Classics and he gave a talk in London which included the sentence “the reason the British are a second-rate power has to do with their teaching too much Latin in their schools” (vel sim.)
Some deep boyhood scarring from having to do Latin in a UK school, I think. Also Keynes was a classicist and that was pre-2008.
1/26/2014 2:47 pm
RT
Keynes was a classicist? You are a classicist.
Keynes was very good at classics at Eton, but that doesn’t make him a classicist, does it?
Best,
S
1/26/2014 3:21 pm
Yes, Sam, and I was a classicist inter al when I was 18 too, as was Keynes, whose interest in philosophy, membership of Cambridge Apostles, presidency of the Cambridge Union presumably drew from what he did at Eton, including classics. That’s all I meant.
Best, R
1/27/2014 12:24 am
see subsequent tweet by jacob weisberg making clear that he was being facetious and that summers never said that osborne blew it, or that he shouldnt argue about it.
1/27/2014 2:16 pm
Another difficulty with twitter; hard to tell when someone is facetious