Obama Defense
Summers already was being criticized by some Democratic senators for his role in advocating deregulation during the Clinton administration. Obama on Capitol Hill this week defended Summers in response to a question from a lawmaker during a closed meeting, saying the criticism has been unfair.
Obama won’t make a choice for the Fed post until at least September, officials say. Speculation has centered on Summers, 58, and Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen, 66, who, if appointed, would be the first female Fed chairman. Obama also mentioned former Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn, 70, as a potential nominee in his meeting with House Democrats.
Bernanke, whose second term ends Jan. 31, hasn’t indicated whether he would seek or accept a third.
Much of Summers’s gain in wealth can be attributed to his work for Wall Street after he left the Clinton administration in 2001 and served as Harvard president until resigning in 2006. As a managing director at D.E. Shaw, he reported earning $5.2 million in the 16 months before his 2009 filing.
D.E. Shaw
The job entailed coming into the office periodically and working on investment ideas based on mathematical models, according to Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and former Shaw employee who worked on a couple of Summers’s projects.
“They gave him a cushy position and didn’t ask him to come in very often,” O’Neil said in a telephone interview.
O’Neil, who has been critical of Summers on her blog at mathbabe.org, said the work in her division often focused on finding market participants with transparent trading strategies and figuring out how to profit off of this so-called dumb money.
D.E. Shaw, through spokeswoman Amy Rosenberg, declined to comment on Summers’s tasks or O’Neil’s description.