50 Facts About Lawrence Summers

Lawrence Henry Summers was born on November 30,1954 and 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.

Lawrence Summers 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.

Lawrence Summers left Harvard in 1991, working as the Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1991 to 1993.

In 1993, Lawrence Summers was appointed Under Secretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton's administration.

Lawrence Summers was 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 USfinancial system, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

Lawrence 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.

Lawrence Summers regularly writes opinion columns for The Washington Post.

Lawrence Summers is the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow.

Lawrence Summers spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended Harriton High School.

Lawrence Summers was an active member of the MIT debating team and qualified for participation in the annual National Debate Tournament three times.

In 1983, at age 28, Lawrence Summers became one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history.

Lawrence Summers was a visiting academic at the London School of Economics in 1987.

Lawrence Summers has three children with his first wife, Victoria Joanne.

In December 2005, Lawrence Summers married English professor Elisa New, who has three daughters from a previous marriage.

Lawrence Summers has worked in international economics, economic demography, economic history and development economics.

Lawrence Summers received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1993 from the American Economic Association.

Lawrence Summers is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lawrence Summers served as an economic adviser to the Dukakis Presidential campaign in 1988.

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

In December 1991, while at the World Bank, Lawrence Summers signed a memo that was leaked to the press.

Lant Pritchett has claimed authorship of the private memo, which both he and Lawrence Summers say was intended as sarcasm.

In 1993, Lawrence Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs and later in the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration.

Lawrence Summers was deeply involved in the Clinton administration's effort to bail out Mexico and Russia when those nations had currency crises.

Lawrence Summers set up a project through which the Harvard Institute for International Development provided advice to the Russian government between 1992 and 1997.

Lawrence 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.

Lawrence 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.

Under the advice of Kenneth Lay, Lawrence Summers urged Davis to relax California's environmental standards in order to reassure the markets.

In February 2009, Lawrence Summers quoted John Maynard Keynes, saying "When circumstances change, I change my opinion", reflecting both on the failures of Wall Street deregulation and his new leadership role in the government bailout.

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.

Lawrence Summers 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.

Lawrence Summers claimed that West's "rap" album was an "embarrassment" to the university.

Lawrence Summers then began by identifying three hypotheses for the higher proportion of men in high-end science and engineering positions:.

Lawrence Summers then concluded his discussion of the three hypotheses by saying:.

Lawrence Summers then went on to discuss approaches to remedying the shortage of women in high-end science and engineering positions.

Lawrence Summers had stronger support among Harvard College students than among the college faculty.

In July 2005, a board member of Harvard Corporation, Conrad K Harper, resigned saying he was angered both by the university president's comments about women and by Summers being given a salary increase.

Harvard and Andrei Shleifer, a close friend and protege of Lawrence Summers, controversially paid $28.5 million to settle a lawsuit by the US government over the conflict of interest Shleifer had while advising Russia's privatization program.

Lawrence Summers's continued support for Shleifer strengthened Summers's unpopularity with other professors, as reported in The Harvard Crimson:.

Lawrence Summers believed that the matter was outside the university's jurisdiction, and advised the twins to take their complaint to the courts.

On February 21,2006, Lawrence Summers announced his intention to step down at the end of the school year effective June 30,2006.

Lawrence Summers is a member in the Group of Thirty.

Lawrence Summers currently serves on the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council, and was part of a 2015 Berggruen-organized meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Lawrence Summers is a former member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group.

In 2013, Lawrence Summers became an early angel investor in India's first car rental company, Zoomcar, which was started by his former Harvard Teaching Fellow.

Romer revised her recommendation to $1.2 trillion, which Lawrence Summers agreed to include in the memo, but Lawrence Summers struck the figure at the last minute.

In June 2011 Lawrence 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.

Lawrence Summers joined the board of person-to-person lending company Lending Club in December 2012.

In July 2015 Lawrence 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.

However, Lawrence 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 2013, Lawrence Summers emerged as one of two leading candidates, along with Janet Yellen, to succeed Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve.