Larry Summers's official title is director of the White House National Economic Council. In layman's terms, he's the president's top economic adviser. He delivers a daily economic briefing to the president and, along with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who worked under him at Treasury in the 1990s, has been largely responsible for shaping the administration's economic policies and molding its response to the recession. Summers has made his mark on everything from priorities for spending in the stimulus package to efforts to fix the nation's banks.
Summers came to the White House with a long résumé and some personal baggage. At 16, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; by 28, he was a fully tenured professor at Harvard University, one of the youngest in its history. After serving as treasury secretary for a year and a half during the Clinton administration, he became Harvard's president. But he was forced out of that position by the faculty after suggesting that men and women may have different innate aptitudes for math and science.
Lately, the large degree to which Obama is said to rely upon Summers's economic advice has received similar scrutiny, given elements of his track record. In the 1990s, Summers was a strong advocate of deregulation; in 2006, he joined up with the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. Some critics say he is too cozy with Wall Street. On the other hand, Summers's supporters say his knowledge of the industry makes him well suited for addressing the country's complex financial problems, even if his personality isn't a hit with the American public.
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