Hacker News Reader

Comment by kchoudhu | Hacker News Reader

Is this the same Larry Summers that lost a billion dollars for no reason by forcing the Harvard endowment into a bunch of shitty IRS trades?

View on HN

Yes, the Larry Summers that lost 1.8 billion dollars.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/11/29/how-larry-s...

To be fair, overall he made money - the 1.8 billion number was just the dip, but they were making money hand over fist in the years before, more than enough to come out positive overall.

Honestly, Summers has joined the pantheon of people I recommend people never take economic advice from -- also included are Jimmy Cayne, Vik Pandit and Dick Fuld.

>Update: Brad DeLong, in the comments, does some back-of-the-envelope math and reckons that Harvard came out ahead of the game, on net, even after accounting for that $1.8 billion loss.

And the comments are closed. Neat.

It is unfortunate indeed because I would like to read the comments in the blog as well.

Despite the recovery of the "lost" or invested 1.8 billion, the story gives no good impression of Larry Summers.

That doesn’t seem relevant to the topic at hand.

It's probably tangential,and anyone can get unlucky, but it does seem kind of fair to judge economic policy advisors by the performance of assets they control. We might get better predictions if they had to put their money where their mouth is, and everyone could see their scorecard.

Your argument is that a good understanding of economics will inevitably lead to good gains in your investments, and a lack of performance in your investments means that you lack a good understand of economics.

That seems kind of shaky to me.

The two topics are tangentially related at best, though. Economic policy deals with much more than simply the stock market. Furthermore, economists typically don't specialize in investment management.

It still shows what to think about the economic experts in banks, politics and schools like Harvard.

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=40313

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=39889

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=39788

It kind of does. Why should we take his opinion seriously after the debacle at Harvard?

Same reason people take the Federal Reserve seriously, even after failing to see literally every single recession on their watch.

A very human bias is to believe and follow those in positions of authority, despite long and verifiable records of abject failure and incompetence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com