Lawrence Summers​, Former Secretary of the Treasury

Biography

Lawrence Summers is an American Economist who was the Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton. Additionally Lawrence was the director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2010. Summers was also the Chief Economist and VP of Development Economics of the World Bank in 1991-1993.

Lawrence attended MIT when he was 16 and eventually graduated from Harvard receiving his PHD. He is currently a Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and previously was the President of Harvard from 2001 to 2006. His background is economics teaching at Harvard.

After Summers left Harvard, he worked freelance for financial institutions including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase.

Twitter: @LHSummers

Lawrence Summers Bitcoin Quotes

• “Until now whenever we’ve needed to transfer money we’ve had to rely on a third party, whether it be a bank, a clearing house or a payment network.Bitcoin offers, for the first time, a method for transferring value and making payments from anywhere to anywhere, in real-time, without any intermediary. This could mean we soon see many billions of people sending bitcoins every day as easily as they currently send a text message” 2015 [source]
• “I’m not ready to stand with those who are sure they have seen the future here, but it seems to me that it’s a serious mistake to write this off as either ill conceived or illegitimate” 2014 [source]
• “It seems to me that the people who confidently reject all the innovation here (in new payment and monetary systems) are on the wrong side of history” 2014 [source]
• “Is the blockchain technology going to be fundamental? I think the answer is overwhelmingly likely to be yes. Is bitcoin going to be a valuable store of value, the same way as people use gold? I don’t know, but I think that certainly the answer is “no” doesn’t seem like the right position to take” 2016 [source]
• “(Finance) is ripe for disruption” 2014 [source]
• “I think Bitcoin has the potential to be a very, very important development” 2014 [source]
• “Very serious economist thought that the internet was going to be no more important than the fax machine, so I’m not willing to dismiss Bitcoin” 2014 [source]

Involvement with Bitcoin

• Lawrence Summers is on the advisory board of Xapo which is a Bitcoin wallet exchange. [source] 

Media Sources

• Bitcoin and the future of Payments Technology – Fireside chat with Lawrence Summers. 2015 [source]

Related Bitcoin Quotes

Jerome Powell, 16th Chairman of the Federal Reserve

Biography

Jerome “Jay” Powell is the 16th Chair of the Federal Reserve, he has also served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors since 2012. While Mr. Powell is not a Bitcoin advocate, his position as the Chair of the US Central bank offers a unique perspective into the potential monetary revolution at hand. 

Jerome Powell Bitcoin Quotes

• When asked about if there is a potential for a cryptocurrency to diminish or remove the need for a reserve currency he replied: “Things like that are possible, but we really haven’t seen them, we haven’t seen widespread adoption. Bitcoin is a good example. Really almost no one uses Bitcoin for payments, they use it more as an alternative to gold really, it’s a store of value, it’s a speculative store of value like gold. People, of course, have been talking about this since cryptocurrencies emerged. But we haven’t seen it, and that’s not to say we won’t see it. And if we do see it yes you could see a return to an era in the United States when we had many different currencies, the so-called national-banking era.” [source]
• “Really almost no one uses bitcoin for payments — they use it as an alternative to gold. It’s a store of value, a speculative store of value, like gold.” [source]
• “People have been talking about this [removing a reserve currency] since cryptocurrencies emerged, and we haven’t seen it, but that’s not to say we won’t see it. But if we do see it, we may return to an era in the United States where we saw many different currencies in the national banking era.” [source]

Involvement with Bitcoin

• N/A

Media Sources

• Congressional Hearing on Libra  [source]

Related Bitcoin Quotes