Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers speaks during the World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 2024. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Larry Summers is the archetype of the technocratic Democratic insider. A prodigy whose abilities in the academy propelled him to powerful roles in government, he has for decades enjoyed close relationships with nearly every important figure in left-of-center politics, including advising former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and (in an informal role) Joe Biden. His CV gives the impression of the sort of shrewd politico who might broker an epic compromise to save the day in an episode of “The West Wing.”

Beyond the paragons of liberal society, Summers also has prodigious connections to more unsavory sorts, from financial bottom-feeders to goofy Silicon Valley founders like Jack Dorsey — and an outright criminal like human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

So it felt overdue when the Harvard Crimson first reported Monday night that Summers would “step back from all public commitments.” Summers was “deeply ashamed,” he told the paper in a statement, and he took “full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.” The Harvard economist would continue teaching, he said in the statement, and he did not specify which commitments he’d be stepping back from.

Summers, it bears remembering, had been publicly chastened and made a comeback before.

He’s survived numerous scandals, including previous reporting on his connections to Epstein while serving as president of Harvard University. But nothing has laid bare his cavalier attitude toward the appearance of impropriety like the close friendship revealed in the newly released trove of Epstein’s emails. They contain frequent correspondence between the late billionaire sex criminal and both Summers and his wife, Elisa New, a literature professor emerita at Harvard. The emails shed new light on what Summers had previously told the Wall Street Journal was a relationship that “primarily focused on global economic issues.”

Indeed, the emails reveal the two men had a close relationship and discussed deeply personal issues together long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction on the charge of solicitation of a minor — up until July 5, 2019, the day before the financier’s final arrest and subsequent death. In one message, the married Summers bemoans his pursuit of an unnamed woman, to which Epstein offers his read on the situation: “shes smart. making you pay for past errors. … you reacted well.” In further reporting published Monday by the Crimson*,* Summers and Epstein also discussed the economist’s pursuit of a woman he reportedly referred to as a mentee, and the late financier dubbed himself Summers’s “wing man.”

Summers is a towering figure in economic discourse. The son of two economists and nephew of two Nobel laureates in the subject (his father, Robert Summers, née Samuelson, was Paul Samuelson’s brother; his mother was Kenneth Arrow’s sister), he grew up steeped in the discipline. Not to be overshadowed by his relations, Summers earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he became a tenured professor before turning 30, one of the youngest in the school’s history. He went on to hold posts as chief economist at the World Bank, secretary of the Treasury Department, Harvard president, and director of the National Economic Council. That’s the side of his story fit for “The West Wing.”

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The undercurrent is far less flattering. While at the World Bank, Summers signed a memo that argued for dumping waste in African nations, although he later claimed it was meant to be sarcastic. As Treasury secretary, he pushed for deregulation and the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act’s banking oversight, and, crucially, helped block regulation of over-the-counter derivatives (financial instruments traded directly between counterparties, rather than on an exchange) — a decision that ultimately contributed to the disastrous 2008 financial crash. Incidentally, Summers would go on to make millions of dollars working for banks and hedge funds.

After serving in Clinton’s Treasury Department for both terms (he started as undersecretary, then deputy secretary, and ascended to secretary when his mentor, Robert Rubin, left in 1999), Summers ascended to the Harvard presidency. His tenure was eventful. He famously clashed with Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the Afro-American Studies Department; multiple prominent faculty members considered leaving just months into his administration. (On-campus affairs clearly remain top of mind for Summers, whose last public tweet before the Epstein emails dropped was hand-wringing about the Crimson’s support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.)

Summers caused an uproar as university president when he attempted to explain the gender imbalance in the economics profession by claiming it was the result of women being innately worse at mathematical thinking. While he has claimed this was taken out of context, one of his email exchanges with Epstein showed that Summers’s disdain toward women’s intelligence hadn’t dissipated in the decade since his ouster in 2006. In the email, he snarked: “I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.” Under Summers’s leadership, Harvard’s hiring of women to tenure track positions fell from 36 percent to a mere 13 percent. Since then, Summers has become a martyr of sorts for pundits, conservative and liberal alike, decrying cancel culture.

Following his supposed cancellation, Summers took a brief sojourn to Wall Street hedge fund D.E. Shaw, where he made $5.2 million in the two years of his employment at the firm, despite reportedly only working one day a week. Summers padded out his lifestyle by pulling in an additional $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street banks.

With future aspirations in academia apparently limited to merely an at-large professorship at Harvard, Summers turned his eye back to politics in 2008. After advising Obama’s campaign, Summers took an influential role as director of the National Economic Council, where he was instrumental in cutting down the size of the new administration’s stimulus package. After losing out on the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, Summers returned to Harvard, where he has remained since, while still exerting his influence in the world of politics. He was in the running for a return to the Treasury in the Biden administration, and publicly railed against Covid-19 stimulus checks.

The illustrious deregulator has advised or sat on boards for dozens of companies, including predatory lenders, Wall Street behemoths, and cryptocurrency cons.

Naturally, he also hasn’t been left wanting for lucrative opportunities in the private sector, often explicitly renting out his reputation to corporations. The illustrious deregulator has advised or sat on boards for dozens of companies, including predatory lenders, Wall Street behemoths, and cryptocurrency cons. He worked for Genie Energy while the firm was drilling in the Golan Heights, the illegal Israeli settlement in Syria. He’s also advised CitiBank and Marc Andreessen’s a16z.

On at least three separate occasions, Summers has left a company shortly before they faced investigation. In 2018, he left LendingClub less than a month before the Federal Trade Commission sued the fintech company, charging it with deceptive practices. (The FTC announced in July 2021 that LendingClub would pay $18 million to settle the charges.) He left Digital Currency Group at some point in 2022; the firm’s website listed him as an adviser until November 2022. However, while following up on calls for more transparent disclosure from Summers, Protos reported he had left earlier than that. In any event, the crypto company was hit with a joint SEC/Justice Department probe in January 2023, followed by a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James in October. (In January, the SEC announced the company would pay $38.5 million in civil penalties.) On February 9, 2024, he abruptly resigned from Block (formerly Square), just one week before they faced investigation from federal regulators. (In January 2025, Block was hit with $255 million in penalties from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and 48 states.)

Still, when Sam Altman faced mutiny from inside OpenAI and fired the entire board, it was Larry Summers to whom he turned for help consolidating his control and appeasing investors.

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On top of all of this advising and a full professorship, Summers has still found time to be a columnist at the Washington Post, a regular Bloomberg contributor, and an omnipresent source for the journalism elite. Despite this lack of work-life balance, Summers also amazingly managed to make headlines in 2023 by calling for unemployment to increase to combat inflation, set against the backdrop of a tropical locale.

Summers has spent decades enjoying the finer things of life inside the D.C. Beltway: power, fame, millions of dollars, multiple flights on Epstein’s private plane. Over that time frame, he has brought ruin to our financial system, destroyed American manufacturing, helped stop student debt relief, hampered the recovery from the Great Recession, and helped ensure that economic policy serves the interests of capital holders and not workers. In short, we live in a hell made possible in no small part by Summers’ influence.

After years of maintaining a close relationship with a known sex trafficker, he is still teaching undergraduates at Harvard.

The antifeminist writer Helen Andrews recently highlighted Summers’s case as an example of the failures of “cancel culture.” In a way she’s right: Cancel culture failed spectacularly to excise Summers from positions of influence. After years of maintaining a close relationship with a known sex trafficker (which has been public knowledge for years), he is still teaching undergraduates at Harvard. He was advising presidents and senators as recently as 2023. His “cancellation” was not even enough to preclude his consideration for a Cabinet post that would have put him fifth in line for the presidency (again).

As much as any single person can, Summers embodies the most odious qualities of the political elite and the scorn they show for basic human well-being. We don’t need to be getting our policy insights from a pedophile-adjacent, ethically conflicted nepo baby. His advice isn’t worth it. He was wrong about our recent bout of inflation. He was wrong about bank deregulation. He was wrong about free trade agreements. He was wrong about fiscal stimulus. He even lost Harvard nearly $2 billion as president.

We should demand much more from our economists, policymakers, and leaders. Indeed, making a more humane, responsive government will depend on it.

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