Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers' name is consistently placed prominently on the list of candidates to be President Obama's Treasury Secretary. This is rather striking since the policies he promoted as Treasury Secretary and in his subsequent writings led to the economic disaster that we now face.

As Treasury Secretary, Summers embraced the high dollar policy promoted by his predecessor Robert Rubin. While it offered short-term benefits in the form of cheap imports and lower inflation, the high dollar also produced a large and growing trade deficit. Just like tax cuts that cause unsustainable budget deficits, the high dollar policy of the Clinton years was unsustainable over the long-run.

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It would be a really bad start to his administration if President Obama picked a Treasury Secretary who shares a substantial part of the blame for the bubble economy and the financial crisis. It will not be easy to pick up the pieces and get the economy back on its feet, but we would be going in the wrong direction to put one of the people responsible for getting us in this mess in the top economic position in the Obama administration.

Sheila Bair, the current head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, can boast of clean hands. Unlike other contenders, she never obstructed regulation of the $60 trillion credit default swap market. Nor did she push to maintain the over-valued dollar that gave us an $800 billion trade deficit. Unlike many others dealing with the fallout from the housing crash, she has noticed that people are losing their homes and has made preventing this a top priority.

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President Obama will have a historic opportunity to establish himself as a truly great president in his first days in office. He can take advantage of the current economic crisis to announce plans to jump start national health care insurance. Extending health care insurance can be an effective stimulus that will provide an immediate boost to the economy.

More importantly, it will provide the same access to health care that people in other wealthy countries have long taken for granted. For this accomplishment, President Obama will rank alongside Presidents Roosevelt and Lincoln as one of the nation's truly great presidents.

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