Obama goes all-in on Inspector Clouseau for the Fed

So, the Obama Administration is ‘all-in’ on Summers, despite nearly everyone who hasn’t worked for him (and a number who have) thinking he’s not the best candidate. The argument: ‘crisis experience,’ and the need for a ‘steady hand.’

Summers’s crisis experience is like Inspector Clouseau’s, the master detective who always seems to be at the scene of the crime.

You have to ask yourself, how much were his policies of fostering TBTF banks and an unstable shadow banking system to blame for the biggest financial crisis in 80+ years?

You want a Fed chair committed to building a simpler, more resilient financial system, not one who is going to foster more moral hazard by promising to ‘handle’ them as they arrive (with ‘liquidity puts’, bailouts, and bank subsidies).

There’s a time for a steady hand, and a time for a reformer, and the ‘steady hand’ who helped architect an unstable, fragile system that failed catastrophically isn’t the right guy to fix it.

The problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. _ Albert Einstein (attributed)