That was necessary because some readers of Robert Shiller’s column in today’s NYT might have been misled into believing that the head of President Obama’s National Economic Council was one of those warning of the current crisis. In fact, the opposite was the case.

Mr. Summers, along with Alan Greenspan, was one of the high priests of the everything is just fine school. If he did see the housing bubble and recognized the disaster that would result from its collapse, he was extremely effective in keeping this insight to himself.

–Dean Baker

Dean Baker is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Read more about Dean.