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
