Larry Summers, Former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Helps Launch Questrom School Institute at BU
BU Today — An overdue defense of capitalism—paired with a better understanding of what responsible businesses owe society—makes a new Boston University institute devoted to those causes essential, former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said at the institute’s formal launch.
The Questrom School of Business Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets, & Society also strums a familial chord for Summers, whose mother pioneered the academic study of business and society interactions, he told an interviewer before the launch dinner audience on September 19 at BU’s Center for Computing & Data Sciences.
“My mother, who died at the age of 98 just a year ago, was a Wharton [School] professor,” Summers, a former president of Harvard, told Harvard Business Review senior editor Curt Nickisch (Questrom’13). “The thing she was most proud of was inaugurating business and public policy courses in the early ’80s,” in the belief that businesses needed to understand sentiments in the broader society. The goal of the Mehrotra Institute, Summers said, is “actually very personal for me.” READ MORE
Larry Summers Isn’t Second-Guessing the Government on Inflation
New York Times — Interest payments aren’t counted in the inflation rate. This is a fact that a lot of readers find confusing, if not angering, especially now, when rates are high on mortgages, auto loans and credit cards. I get lots of mail from people saying the absence of interest rates from the Consumer Price Index seems like sleight of hand by the government, the economics profession or both.
So I probably won’t win a lot of friends by saying that I think the way the government economists do things is correct. But when they’re right, they’re right. READ MORE
