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Collateral damage from the Epstein files: Larry Summers

The Greeks had a phrase for it: ‘Character is fate.’

Like the proverbial bad penny, Larry Summers keeps turning up. He has now turned up in the Epstein files, revealing not only a long-standing chummy relationship with the sexual predator, but explicit emails worthy of a nerdy tenth grader looking for advice on how to bed an evasive girlfriend. Epstein should know.

Summers wrote in his email that his coy mistress kept ducking trysts. “And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming … I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.”

He put this in an email. To Jeffrey Epstein. Poor Larry, a friend without benefits.

This was in 2019, long after Epstein’s sordid history was well documented. And Epstein advised Summers, “shes smart. making you pay for past errors … you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.”

Summers was married at the time to Harvard professor Elisa New, who is still his wife. And while he was seeking Epstein’s advice on how to two-time his spouse, Summers was also enlisting Epstein to raise $110,000 for one of New’s poetry projects. Nice touch, better than sending flowers.

If this sleazy attitude toward women rings a vague bell, let’s recall that Summers’s contempt for women’s intellectual capacities was one of the main factors that led to his ouster as Harvard president. In another email to Epstein, Summers wrote that he still believed that.

This week, Summers put out a statement of groveling apology. “I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.”

A little late. And totally in character.

In the aftermath of these icky revelations, a number of commentators have called for Summers’s long-delayed banishment from elite posts and especially from institutions connected to the Democrats. Today, in a scoop for the Prospect, Dan Boguslaw revealed that Summers is slated to be the economic policy lead on the Center for American Progress’s “Project 2029” effort.

I agree that it’s long past time to jettison Summers as hopelessly contaminated. But there are far more serious reasons to dump Summers than his gross connections with Epstein.

For starters, his wretched advice as Obama’s top economic aide during the financial collapse and the ensuing, needlessly prolonged recession consigned tens of millions of Americans to avoidable economic misery, and led to a backlash that gave us Donald Trump. As disgusting as the Epstein revelations are, that’s worse.

Summers’s perverse advice to Obama took three forms.

First, he vetoed an economic stimulus package of a scale adequate to cut short the damage and spur a rapid recovery. (When Joe Biden, faced with a similar economic threat in 2021 and 2022, did deliver an adequate stimulus, Summers played the role of skunk at the picnic and wrongly attacked Biden for causing inflation that was mainly the result of COVID-driven supply chain shortages, delivering talking points to Republicans. And this guy is now in charge of the 2029 project?)

Second, Summers gave Obama terrible advice on the kind of financial reform needed, given that Wall Street excesses had caused the collapse. Summers, with his own close Wall Street connections, blocked efforts to break up the biggest banks and oust their corrupt management, as is the practice in disasters of this scale where management is culpable. He also whipped against an Obama promise to change the law to allow primary residence mortgage terms to be modified in bankruptcy.

Third, Summers and his economic team persuaded Obama that the recovery was well under way as early as 2009, when unemployment was still raging, and blocked the efforts of progressives in Congress to pass a second stimulus package.

But it gets even worse. It was Summers, as Clinton’s Treasury secretary, who relentlessly promoted the extreme deregulation of Wall Street, especially the deregulation of derivatives, that led to the toxic speculation which caused the financial collapse in the first place. So Summers has no business being let anywhere near economic policy, least of all Democrats’ economic policy.

If you can stand more detail, I wrote this extended investigative piece on Summers’s career for the Prospect in 2020, titled “Falling Upward.” What’s consistent is the man’s character.

The penny, incidentally, is about to be discontinued. Summers should have been discontinued long ago.

–ROBERT KUTTNER

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