Oh Great... Here Comes Larry Summers
If you lose your bet on the Kentucky Derby tonight, throw your television off the balcony. That way you don't have to listen to this economist on Sunday morning.
Great…
Tomorrow, economist Larry Summers is set to weigh in on the current economy on the Sunday morning talk shows.
Spare me.
Summers finally got something right three years ago when he warned that the U.S. government had overstimulated the economy with excessive fiscal policy.
But now, he’ll likely criticize the Trump administration’s tariffs... He joins the long line of experts who have something to say… Not that I’m defending Trump… but I would just like the answer to two questions for any critics. Because they warrant answers.
What is Summers plan to address the extreme and persistent trade deficit with China?
What is his plan to restore U.S. industrial capacity hollowed out by the strong dollar and reserve status dynamics?
This isn’t academic.
Because the tariffs are a response to decades of challenges that land on Summers’ desk.
Summers was a key architect of the global trade framework that empowered China.
He supported China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status and WTO accession in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
He claimed these policies would liberalize China and benefit U.S. consumers and firms.
Instead, it gutted U.S. manufacturing and empowered authoritarian industrial policy.
When questioned about this, I assume he’d reply like any defensive economist and academic would, suggesting that he operated with the information he had at the time, that things are nuanced, and that I wasn’t there, therefore it’s easy to criticize.
No… It’s easy to criticize because risk management is my job.
This is the same guy who helped marginalize Brooksley Born and get her run out of Washington in the 1990s when, as the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), she warned about the dangers of derivatives speculation.
He supported the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 and resisted regulation of derivatives, policies that contributed directly to the 2008 financial collapse.
His defense of financial liberalization has aged as poorly as his trade optimism.
While Summers now acknowledges inflation, there are some wild opinions about the 2% inflation target—a policy that gradually eroded real wages and purchasing power.
Alongside Janet Yellen and others, he treated inflation as a tool, not a threat.
Summers has suggested that we temporarily go even higher on the inflation target if necessary… (Temporary… you know… like transitory…)
Does Anyone Have a Plan?
At the end of the day… this is about American industry.
While economists like David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson documented the China Shock—massive job losses in U.S. manufacturing communities—Summers often dismissed these concerns with elite detachment. Millions of Americans lost their jobs due to those policies implemented from the 1990s.
And when reflecting on the massive amounts of job losses in regions like the Midwest, Summers has just suggested these workers could simply just reskill, relocate, and adapt.
Learn to code, essentially.
This attitude misunderstands the soul of the American worker.
People want to build and create, not just shuffle into services or gig work at DoorDash.
Summers and his peers have long treated labor as a flexible input, not as people with skills, pride, and communities.
He has also consistently failed to propose actionable structural reforms.
No plan for restoring industrial competitiveness. No ideas for reducing capital’s dominance or addressing asset inflation. No strategy for increasing labor bargaining power (outside of minimum wage hikes and child tax credits).
No serious challenge to Fed-driven inequality.
Instead, he offers the usual technocratic tropes: “skills training,” “tax reform,” or vague mobility programs. These are half-measures from someone with the power and platform to do more.
He complains about Trump’s tariffs, yet he was a Keynesian stimulus hawk after the 2008 crash and has flip-flopped on monetary expansion when politically convenient.
And what’s his position on the Fed?
Support through omission…
Summers rarely engages with the central problem in American finance: that the Fed’s policies have inflated asset bubbles, distorted capital flows, and widened inequality by rewarding capital over labor. He treats inequality as a second-order macro issue rather than a structural failure of the core monetary policies that govern America.
Even when he acknowledges the problems of dollar reserve dominance, he offers no plan for transition—no Bretton Woods II, no multi-polar reserve vision, no structural fix.
So when he shows up on Sunday morning to discuss tariffs, inflation, or trade, someone should ask… What is YOUR PLAN, Larry?
He’s had power, influence, and platforms.
He led Harvard. He served in the White House. He sat at the table.
And what’s the outcome?
Don’t answer that… or your nose will bleed.
What About You, Garrett?
Okay… I hear someone… somewhere… asking…
Garrett, what’s your plan?
Well, I don’t have a cabinet post or a network studio.
But I do have a view. As I’ve noted, all roads lead back to monetary policy.
So, here’s what I’d propose if I had the chance to go on a Sunday morning show:
Federal Reserve Reform: Shift the Fed to a single mandate—financial stability. Eliminate the 2% inflation target and move to a price-level or zero-inflation framework. Prioritize purchasing power for the American consumer instead of saying that we need to be able to buy lots of cheap Chinese shit.
Transparency: Mandate full public disclosures of swap line recipients, collateral terms, and balance sheet mechanics. Sunlight matters, and a Sunday morning show would be a great place to disclose these Fed actions.
Dollar System Reform: To mitigate dollar reserve burdens, create a parallel energy—or commodity-linked trade settlement mechanism. Our currency isn’t backed by anything, so its decay will be gradual, and then the really bad outcome will be sudden. Reforming the currency now will lead to reform in manufacturing and plenty of other parts of the economy. The dollar’s reserve role is now the chief mechanism of centralization in the American economy, concentrating power, inflating asset values, and hollowing out productive enterprise.
QE Limits: We have to slow down the money printer. So, let’s prohibit Mortgage Backed Security and credit-risk asset purchases. If QE is used at all, it should be limited to short-term Treasuries.
Banking Reform: Adjust Basel rules to encourage lending to productive enterprise, not speculation. Consider transaction taxes to limit excessive short-term trading. I know that taxes are a bad word, but incentives matter.
These steps would restore transparency, reduce moral hazard, and rebalance the economy away from asset inflation and elite enrichment.
In essence, we’d be undoing a lot of Summers’ work from the last 40 years.
Stay positive,
Garrett Baldwin
If someone ran on this platform, they’d have my vote and political contributions.