Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist. He served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001, the 27th president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, and the eighth director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010."Historical Facts", Harvard University, retrieved March 31, 2017 He was the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard Kennedy School until his resignation in February 2026.
Summers became a professor of economics at Harvard University in 1983. He left Harvard in 1991, working as the chief economist of the World Bank from 1991 to 1993."Former Chief Economists" , Data & Research office, The World Bank, retrieved March 31, 2017 In 1993, Summers was appointed Under Secretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton's administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury."Lawrence Summers (1999–2001)," U.S. Treasury Department, Last Updated: November 20, 2010, retrieved March 31, 2017 While working for the Clinton administration, Summers played a leading role in the American response to the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 1998 Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard Institute for International Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states, and in the deregulation of the U.S. financial system, including the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act.
Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he offered three reasons for the under-representation of women in science and engineering, including the possibility that there exists a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", in addition to patterns of discrimination and socialization.
After his first departure from Harvard, Summers worked as a managing director at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. Summers rejoined public service during the Obama administration, serving as the director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he was Director of the White House National Economic Council, part of the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession.
He went on leave from his teaching responsibilities at Harvard and his role as the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government in November 2025 due to an investigation into his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.Summers, Lawrence H. and John A. Haigh "From the Directors," About section, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, retrieved March 31, 2017
Early life and education Summers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, into a Jewish family. He was the son of two economists, Robert Summers (who changed the family surname from Samuelson) and Anita Summers (of Romanian-Jewish ancestry), who were both professors at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson (brother of Robert Summers) and Kenneth Arrow (brother of Anita Arrow Summers). He spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended Harriton High School.
At age 16, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he originally intended to study mathematics but soon switched to economics, graduating in 1975. He was also an active member of the MIT debating team and qualified for participation in the annual National Debate Tournament three times. He attended Harvard University as a graduate student, receiving his Ph.D. in 1982.
Early career (1983–2001)
Harvard (1983–1987)
In 1983, at age 28, Summers became one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. He was a visiting academic at the London School of Economics in 1987.
As a researcher, Summers has made important contributions in many areas of economics, primarily public finance, labor economics, financial economics, and macroeconomics. Summers has also worked in international economics, economic demography, economic history and development economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1993 from the American Economic Association. In 1987, he was the first social scientist to win the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. Summers is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Some of his popular courses, as Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, were American Economic Policy and The Political Economy of Globalization.
Summers was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan in 1982–1983. He also served as an economics adviser to the Dukakis Presidential campaign in 1988.
World Bank (1991–1993) Summers left Harvard in 1991 and served as the Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist for the World Bank until 1993.
According to the World Bank's Data & Research office, Summers returned to Washington, D.C., in 1991 as the World Bank's Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist. As such, Summers played a "key role" in designing strategies to aid developing countries, worked on the bank's loan committee, guided the bank's research and statistics operations, and guided external training programs. The World Bank's official site also reports that Summers's research included an "influential" report that demonstrated a very high return from investments in educating girls in developing nations.
According to The Economist, Summers was "often at the centre of heated debates" about economic policy, as he was considered a "famous contrarian".
"Dirty industries" controversy
In December 1991, while at the World Bank, Summers signed a memo that was leaked to the press. Lant Pritchett has claimed authorship of the private memo, which both he and Summers say was intended as sarcasm. The memo stated that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. [...] I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted."Office Memorandum from Lawrence M. Summers, Subject: GEP, the World Bank/IMFMIGA, December 12, 1991. This was an internal memo at the World Bank, that was written, according to Lant Pritchett, by him, and co-signed by Larry. According to Pritchett, a young economist who worked for him at the time in an interview with John Cassidy of The New Yorker, it was not intended for the public – reportedly sarcastic, rather than sincere, according to its authors – that highlighted the economic logic of dumping waste in less-developed countries. According to Pritchett, the memo, as leaked, was doctored to remove context and intended irony., also posted at:
Clinton Administration (1993–2001)
Treasury Department In 1993, Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs and later in the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin.
Much of Summers's tenure at the Treasury Department was focused on international economic issues. He was deeply involved in the Clinton administration's effort to bail out Mexico and Russia when those nations had currency crises. Summers set up a project through which the Harvard Institute for International Development provided advice to the Russian government between 1992 and 1997. Later there was a scandal when it emerged that some of the Harvard project members had invested in Russia and were therefore not impartial advisors. Summers encouraged then-Russian leader Boris Yeltsin to use the same "three-'ations of policy he advocated in the Clinton Administration – "privatization, stabilization, and liberalization".
During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Summers pressured the Korean government to raise its interest rates and balance its budget in the midst of a recession, policies criticized by Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. According to the book The Chastening by Paul Blustein during this crisis, Summers, along with Paul Wolfowitz, pushed for regime change in Indonesia.
Views on financial regulation On May 7, 1998, the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a Concept Release soliciting input from regulators, academics, and practitioners to determine "how best to maintain adequate regulatory safeguards without impairing the ability of the OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives market to grow and the ability of U.S. entities to remain competitive in the global financial marketplace." On July 30, 1998, then-Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Summers testified before the U.S. Congress that "the parties to these kinds of contract are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies." At the time Summers stated that "to date there has been no clear evidence of a need for additional regulation of the institutional OTC derivatives market, and we would submit that proponents of such regulation must bear the burden of demonstrating that need." In 1999, Summers endorsed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act which removed the separation between investment and commercial banks, saying "With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st Century."
Treasury Secretary
In 1999, he succeeded Robert Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury.
Summers was a leading voice within the Clinton Administration arguing against American leadership in greenhouse gas reductions and against US participation in the Kyoto Protocol, according to internal documents made public in 2009.
As Treasury Secretary, Summers led the Clinton Administration's opposition to tax cuts proposed by the Republican Congress in 1999.Aides Say Clinton Would Veto Tax Compromise. The Washington Post. July 26, 1999.
During the 2000 California energy crisis, then-Treasury Secretary Summers teamed with Alan Greenspan and Enron executive Kenneth Lay to lecture California Governor Gray Davis on the causes of the crisis, explaining that the problem was excessive government regulation. Under the advice of Kenneth Lay, Summers urged Davis to relax California's environmental standards in order to reassure the markets.
Glass–Steagall repeal Summers hailed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in 1999, which lifted more than six decades of restrictions against banks offering commercial banking, insurance, and investment services (by repealing key provisions in the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act): "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century," Summers said. "This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy." Many critics, including President Barack Obama, have suggested the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2010 was caused by the partial repeal of the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act.