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Quick facts for kids Lawrence Summers
Summers in 2012

8th Director of the National Economic Council
In office January 20, 2009 – January 20, 2011
President	Barack Obama
Deputy	Diana Farrell Jason Furman
Preceded by	Keith Hennessey
Succeeded by	Gene Sperling
27th President of Harvard University
In office July 1, 2001 – June 30, 2006
Preceded by	Neil Rudenstine
Succeeded by	Derek Bok
71st United States Secretary of the Treasury
In office July 2, 1999 – January 20, 2001
President	Bill Clinton
Deputy	Stuart E. Eizenstat
Preceded by	Robert Rubin
Succeeded by	Paul H. O'Neill
7th United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury
In office August 11, 1995 – July 2, 1999
President	Bill Clinton
Preceded by	Frank N. Newman
Succeeded by	Stuart E. Eizenstat
Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs
In office April 5, 1993 – August 11, 1995
President	Bill Clinton
Preceded by	David Mulford
Succeeded by	Michael Bruno
Chief Economist of the World Bank
In office January 14, 1991 – January 14, 1993
President	Barber Conable Lewis Thompson Preston
Preceded by	Stanley Fischer
Succeeded by	Michael Bruno

Personal details
Born	Lawrence Henry Summers (1954-11-30) November 30, 1954 (age 69) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Spouses	Victoria Perry (m. 1984; div. 2003) Elisa New (m. 2005)
Children	3
Education	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS) Harvard University (MA, PhD)
Signature
Academic career

Institution	Harvard University London School of Economics
Field	Macroeconomics
School or tradition	New Keynesian economics
Doctoral advisor	Martin Feldstein
Doctoral students	Alan Krueger, Kiminori Matsuyama, James R. Hines Jr., Rhee Chang-yong
Awards	John Bates Clark Medal (1993)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist who served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, where he is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. In November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI.

Summers became a professor of economics at Harvard University in 1983. He left Harvard in 1991, working as the Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1991 to 1993. In 1993, Summers was appointed Under Secretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton's administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury. While working for the Clinton administration, Summers played a leading role in the American response to the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard Institute for International Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states, and in the deregulation of the U.S financial system, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he offered three reasons for the under-representation of women in science and engineering, including the possibility that there exists a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", in addition to patterns of discrimination and socialization.

After his departure from Harvard, Summers worked as a managing partner at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. Summers rejoined public service during the Obama administration, serving as the Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession.

Early life and education
Career
Personal life
See also

Early life and education

Summers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, into a Jewish family. He was the son of two economists, Robert Summers (who changed the family surname from Samuelson) and Anita Summers (of Romanian-Jewish ancestry), who were both professors at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson (brother of Robert Summers) and Kenneth Arrow (brother of Anita Arrow Summers). He spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended Harriton High School.

At age 16, he entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he originally intended to study physics but soon switched to economics, graduating in 1975. He was also an active member of the MIT debating team and qualified for participation in the annual National Debate Tournament three times. He attended Harvard University as a graduate student, receiving his Ph.D. in 1982. In 1983, at age 28, Summers became one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. He was a visiting academic at the London School of Economics in 1987.

Career

Academic economist

Summers in 1990

As a researcher, Summers has made important contributions in many areas of economics, primarily public finance, labor economics, financial economics, and macroeconomics. Summers has also worked in international economics, economic demography, economic history and development economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1993 from the American Economic Association. In 1987, he was the first social scientist to win the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. Summers is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Some of his popular courses today, as Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, include American Economic Policy and The Political Economy of Globalization.

Public official

Summers was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan in 1982–1983. He also served as an economic adviser to the Dukakis Presidential campaign in 1988.

Chief Economist at the World Bank

Summers left Harvard in 1991 and served as Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist for the World Bank until 1993.

According to the World Bank's Data & Research office (March 2017), Summers returned to Washington, D.C. in 1991 as the World Bank's Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist. As such, Summers played a "key role" in designing strategies to aid developing countries, worked on the bank's loan committee, guided the bank's research and statistics operations, and guided external training programs.

The World Bank's official site also reports that Summer's research included an "influential" report that demonstrated a very high return from investments in educating girls in developing nations.

According to The Economist, Summers was "often at the centre of heated debates" about economic policy, to an extent exceptional for the history of the World Bank in recent decades.

Service in the Clinton Administration

Summers as United States Secretary of the Treasury

In 1993, Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs and later in the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury.

Much of Summers's tenure at the Treasury Department was focused on international economic issues. He was deeply involved in the Clinton administration's effort to bail out Mexico and Russia when those nations had currency crises. Summers set up a project through which the Harvard Institute for International Development provided advice to the Russian government between 1992 and 1997. Later there was a scandal when it emerged that some of the Harvard project members had invested in Russia and were therefore not impartial advisors. Summers encouraged then-Russian leader Boris Yeltsin to use the same "three-'ations'" of policy he advocated in the Clinton Administration – "privatization, stabilization, and liberalization."

Summers pressured the Korean government to raise its interest rates and balance its budget in the midst of a recession, policies criticized by Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. According to the book The Chastening, by Paul Blustein, during this crisis, Summers, along with Paul Wolfowitz, pushed for regime change in Indonesia.

Summers was a leading voice within the Clinton Administration arguing against American leadership in greenhouse gas reductions and against US participation in the Kyoto Protocol, according to internal documents made public in 2009.

As Treasury Secretary, Summers led the Clinton Administration's opposition to tax cuts proposed by the Republican Congress in 1999.

During the California energy crisis of 2000, then-Treasury Secretary Summers teamed with Alan Greenspan and Enron executive Kenneth Lay to lecture California Governor Gray Davis on the causes of the crisis, explaining that the problem was excessive government regulation. Under the advice of Kenneth Lay, Summers urged Davis to relax California's environmental standards in order to reassure the markets.

Summers hailed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in 1999, which lifted more than six decades of restrictions against banks offering commercial banking, insurance, and investment services (by repealing key provisions in the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act): "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century," Summers said. "This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy." Many critics, including President Barack Obama, have suggested the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis was caused by the partial repeal of the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act. Indeed, as a member of President Clinton's Working Group on Financial Markets, Summers, along with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Arthur Levitt, Fed Chairman Greenspan, and Secretary Rubin, torpedoed an effort to regulate the derivatives that many blame for bringing the financial market down in Fall 2008.

President of Harvard

In 2001, when George W. Bush became President, Summers left the Treasury Department and returned to Harvard as its 27th president, serving from July 2001 until June 2006. He is considered Harvard's first Jewish president, though his predecessor Neil Rudenstine had Jewish ancestry, and received praise from Harvard's Jewish community for his support.

A number of Summers's decisions at Harvard have attracted public controversy.

On February 21, 2006, Summers announced his intention to step down at the end of the school year effective June 30, 2006. Harvard agreed to provide Summers on his resignation with a one-year paid sabbatical leave, subsidized a $1 million outstanding loan from the university for his personal residence, and provided other payments. Former University President Derek Bok acted as Interim President while the University conducted a search for a replacement which ended with the naming of Drew Gilpin Faust on February 11, 2007.

Post-Harvard presidency career

President Barack Obama, on left, discusses with a group in the White House, including Larry Summers on far right (back to camera).

After a one-year sabbatical, Summers subsequently accepted Harvard University's invitation to serve as the Charles W. Eliot University Professor, one of 20 select University-wide professorships, with offices in the Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Business School. In 2006 he was also a member of the Panel of Eminent Persons which reviewed the work of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. He is a member in the Group of Thirty. He also currently serves on the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and was part of a 2015 Berggruen-organized meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Business interests

On October 19, 2006, Summers was hired as a part-time managing director of the New York-based hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. for which he received $5 million in salary and other compensation over a 16-month period. At the same time Summers earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from major financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Upon being nominated Treasury Secretary by President Clinton in 1999, Summers listed assets of about $900,000 and debts, including a mortgage, of $500,000. By the time he returned in 2009 to serve in the Obama administration, he reported a net worth between $17 million and $39 million. He is a former member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group. In 2013, Summers became an early angel investor in India's first car rental company, Zoomcar, which was started by his former Harvard Teaching Fellow.

National Economic Council

Upon the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in January 2009, Summers was appointed to the post of director of the National Economic Council. In this position Summers emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration, where he attracted both praise and criticism.

In January 2009, as the Obama Administration tried to pass an economic stimulus spending bill, Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR.) criticized Summers, saying that he thought that President Barack Obama is "ill-advised by Larry Summers. Larry Summers hates infrastructure." DeFazio, along with liberal economists including Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, had argued that more of the stimulus should be spent on infrastructure, while Summers had supported tax cuts. In late 2008, Summers and economic advisors for then-President-elect Obama presented a memo with options for an economic stimulus package ranging from $550 billion to $900 billion. According to The New Republic, economic advisor Christina Romer initially recommended a $1.8-trillion package, which proposal Summers quickly rejected, believing any stimulus approaching $1 trillion would not pass through Congress. Romer revised her recommendation to $1.2 trillion, which Summers agreed to include in the memo, but Summers struck the figure at the last minute.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Summers called Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) asking him to remove caps on executive pay at firms that have received stimulus money, including Citigroup.

On April 3, 2009, Summers came under renewed criticism after it was disclosed that he was paid millions of dollars the previous year by companies which he now had influence over as a public servant. He earned $5 million from the hedge fund D. E. Shaw and collected $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street companies that received government bailout money.

Post-NEC career

Summers with Volodymyr Groysman in Ukraine

Since leaving the NEC in December 2010, Summers has worked as an advisor to hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co, Citigroup and the NASDAQ OMX Group while resuming his role as a tenured Harvard professor. In June 2011 Summers joined the board of directors of Square, a company developing an electronic payment service, and became a special adviser at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He joined the board of person-to-person lending company Lending Club in December 2012. In July 2015 Summers joined the Board of Directors of Premise Data, a San Francisco-based data and analytics technology company that sources data from a global network of on-the-ground contributors.

In April 2016, he was one of eight former Treasury secretaries who called on the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Union ahead of the June 2016 Referendum.

Summers referred to the United Kingdom's Brexit vote on June 23, 2016 in favor of leaving the European Union as the "worst self-inflicted policy wound that a country has done since the Second World War". However, Summers cautioned that the result was a "wake up call for elites everywhere" and called for "responsible nationalism" in response to simmering public sentiment.

In June 2016, Summers also wrote, "I believe the risks to the US and global economies of Mr Trump's election as president are far greater [than passage of Brexit]. If he is elected, I would expect a protracted recession to begin within 18 months. The damage would be felt far beyond the United States."

2020 presidential election

A coalition of progressive groups called on Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign no longer to use Summers as an advisor, after reports surfaced that Summers was advising the campaign on economic policy. Progressive groups like the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats petitioned the campaign to disavow Summers, saying, "Summers's legacy is advocating for policies that contributed to the skyrocketing inequality and climate crisis we're living with today." Following the outcry, Summers stated he would not be joining a future Biden administration, in the event that Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Candidacy for chairmanship of the Federal Reserve and governorship of the Bank of Israel

In 2013, Summers emerged as one of two leading candidates, along with Janet Yellen, to succeed Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve. The possibility of his nomination created a great deal of controversy with some senators of both parties declaring opposition. On September 15, Summers withdrew his name from consideration for the position.

During the 2013, Summers had been reported as preferred candidate by the Cabinet of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to succeed Stanley Fischer as governor of the Bank of Israel. Netanyahu personally asked him to take the post, an offer he turned down.

Personal life

Summers was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma around 1983, underwent treatment and has remained cancer-free. Summers has three children (older twin daughters Ruth and Pamela and son Harry) with his first wife, Victoria Joanne (Perry). In December 2005, Summers married English professor Elisa New, who has three daughters (Yael, Orli and Maya) from a previous marriage. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.