Word: rubins
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Certainly, Summers has the intellectual rigor to succeed Rubin. He is often described as being the smartest guy in the room--and generous enough to let you know it. Rubin, on the other hand, may actually have been the smartest guy in the room without letting anyone else know it. And right there is the difference between an academic and a bond trader...
Others in the economists' fraternity say that some portion of Rubin's success can be attributed to the man who now replaces him. In part because Rubin dislikes travel, it was often Summers who was dispatched to hot spots to prescribe tough fiscal and monetary medicine. "He's been the point man in Asia," says Kobsak Chutikul, director general of economic affairs at Thailand's Foreign Ministry, "pushing a lot of very sensitive and controversial policy measures," including stiff interest rates...
...December of last year, with economies settling down and currencies stabilizing, Rubin began to put in motion a long-contemplated plan to return to the private sector. Dining with Summers at the Jefferson Hotel, Rubin's Washington residence, he broke the news that he was leaving. Rubin felt strongly that the announcement of his departure and Summers' succession should be simultaneous. The Secretary also wanted to allow financial markets a full trading day to digest the news. Allaying market anxieties as well was an uncharacteristically non-opaque endorsement from Alan Greenspan reassuring Wall Street that Greenspan and Summers, whose friendship...
...Rubin has been unequivocal in his praise for Summers, insisting that his former deputy has "a very good, practical sense of the financial markets. Larry is also self-aware, conscious of things he can do better, and works at it." Summers, who has made great strides in improving his people skills, has a reputation for brilliance, if not tact. "Larry Summers is to humility what Madonna is to chastity," wrote Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal. In diplomatic circles, his untucked shirts, mismatched socks and bluntness have seemed odd to some. But there is no doubt that...
Summers describes himself as a "market-oriented progressive"--his policies not that different from Rubin's. But unlike Rubin, he first made his mark in the relatively genteel realm of academia rather than on the trading floor. A product of the Cambridge crowd of economists--proponents of the so-called Third Way of economic policy, a sort of free-market advocacy with a social conscience--he taught at Harvard for 10 years. A father of three and an avid tennis player--he's a hard-serving, hard-hitting sort of player, as opposed to Greenspan and his cagey spin serves...