Millions for one day a week? And we are somehow to believe he was nothing more than a sounding board and remote observer? Summers continues to do an excellent job as one of the most arrogant re-heated Clinton team hires in Washington. Who else but Summers could convince themselves that the public is so stupid to believe his story? If trust is important to the economy, we're doomed as long as he sticks around.
Mr. Summers and Shaw executives say his role there was to be a sounding board for Shaw’s traders. But interviews with friends and former colleagues suggest that Mr. Summers’s role at D. E. Shaw was wider and more complex.If we play nice, I'm sure the hedge fund industry will be our friends. These are the people who have benefited enormously from paying long term capital gains taxes instead of normal taxes like everyone else. Many people believed that when Obama talked about removing lobbyist influence from the White House, examples such as this would be gone. This is precisely what people are fed up with so something needs to change sooner than later.
Mr. Summers, these people say, was a marquee hire, a prized spokesman for Shaw. He routinely made himself available for private consultations with Shaw’s clients, an attractive perk for investing with the firm, as one client put it.
Mr. Summers, who taught economics and public policy at Harvard while advising Shaw, also met with investors in the United States, as well as in the cash-rich Middle East and Asia. He spoke at industry conferences, mixing with officials from public pension funds, endowments and other large institutions with many billions of dollars to invest.
While at Shaw, Mr. Summers also peered into the inner workings of the $2 trillion hedge fund industry, which the Obama administration is now relying on to buy billions of dollars of worrisome assets from the nation’s beleaguered banks.
