Stop Me Before I Vote Again

http://tinyurl.com/2xamgn

Imagine the TNC-donks had a designated double-domed mouthpiece -- who would it be but Larry Summers? His occasional columns in the Financial Times show us the momentary wind direction at the corner of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

I think it's shifting. Take a look at this compaction I've redacted from a redaction at the site of mild and moderate Mark Thoma: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/10/summers-how-ame.html

The vast majority of the US current account deficit is now being funded by central banks accumulating reserves as they seek to avoid appreciation of their home currencies ... Some means of engagement must be found with those who have yolked their currencies and so their financial policies to that of the US...

Maintaining global financial stability and the role of the dollar requires a more strategic approach -- a task that, given the political calendar, is likely to fall to the next US administration.... [The international system of exchange rates] needs to be radically reinvented .... any new approach must be premised on the desirability of a strong, integrated global economy that benefits the citizens of all countries, not on the idea that economists or politicians can calculate “fair” exchange rates....

The right and potentially effective case for adjustments in the current alignment of exchange rates relies on their unsustainability and the distortions they induce in macroeconomic policies, not on ideas of fairness to workers....

Multilateralism is better politics and economics than unilateralism but it must not become an excuse for inertia. Any new group should be as large as necessary and no larger, should meet with some frequency and should include central bankers. It should be analytically informed but everyone should know that key decisions will ultimately be taken by senior officials in the national interest, not by international organisations.

So much here needs glossing, but obviously this is Larry's early admissions application essay for, what else, globalization czar in the St Hill administration -- the position played by bond ghoul Rubin in the first pair of Clinton administrations. Bobby himself, I expect,will remain in the background, the type of figure Bernard Baruch became in the second Wilson admin of 1917-20, and tried to be again – with, thankfully, zero success -- under FDR.

Will Larry get the job? If he does, we "workers" -- to use his word for us -- are in for a whole lot of nothin' good.