The Wall Street Journal says that the news comes from “Democratic officials” late last night, but a quick scan through our RSS archives at Mashable showed us that he’s no stranger to Silicon Valley.
Sheryl Sandberg, the current COO of Facebook, once served as Summers’ chief of staff during his stint the Clinton administration’s Treasury Secretary. Beyond that, Summers himself is an investor in the startup we termed the “YouTube for Smartie Pants,” BigThink. From our initial review back in January:
Politically, Summers is an interesting choice for Obama. I’m not familiar enough with his personal partisanship to have many pre-conceived notions of the man, but were it not for the fact that he is being named to the top economic slot for the White House, I’d find him to be a delightful contrarian.
To understand what I mean, witness his position on our current economic woes in this video from the BigThink website:
Positivity not-withstanding, as CNet noted in March of this year, he spoke at a Valley-area economic summit, and warned of the Wall-Street financial crisis we’re now living through:
"I believe we are facing the most serious combination of macroeconomic and financial stresses that the U.S. has faced in a generation--and possibly, much longer than that," said Summers, adding that the country has "never been in more need of serious economic thinking than we are now."
[…]
"The current estimates of mortgage losses are $400 billion," he said. "Those estimates are substantially optimistic."
To that end, he’s made headlines from time to time with his sometimes eye-popping soundbytes. He attracted no small amount of outcry from women’s groups by suggesting that “innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers.”
When it became clear a couple of days after the election that he was on a short list of candidates for economic advisory slots in the upcoming Obama administration, the Huffington Post “discovered” a memo he had authored in 1991 as a vice-president of the World Bank that suggested areas of Africa are “UNDER-polluted.”