Lawrence Summers & John Boehner

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Lawrence Summers's Biography

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers is one of America’s leading economists. In addition to serving as 71st Secretary of  the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, Dr. Summers served as Director of the White House National Economic Council in the Obama Administration, as President of Harvard University, and as the Chief Economist of the World Bank.

Dr. Summers’ tenure at the U.S. Treasury coincided with the longest period of sustained economic growth in U.S. history. He is the only Treasury Secretary in the last half century to have left office with the national budget in surplus. Dr. Summers has played a key role in addressing the major financial crisis for the last three decades.

During the 1990s, he was a leader in crafting the U.S. response to international financial crises arising in Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Japan, and Asian emerging markets. As one of President Obama’s chief economic advisors, Dr. Summers’ thinking helped shape the U.S. response to the 2008 financial crisis, to the failure of the automobile industry, and to the pressures on the European monetary system. Upon Summers’ departure from the White House, President Obama said, “I will always be grateful that at a time of great peril for our country, a man of Larry’s brilliance, experience and judgment was willing to answer the call and lead our economic team.” The Economist recognized his influence when it defined the “Summers Doctrine,” an approach to economic policy during financial crises that fuses a microeconomic “laissez faire” mentality with macroeconomic activism. “Markets should allocate capital, labour and ideas without interference, but sometimes markets go haywire, and must be counteracted forcefully by government.”

Summers’ five years as President of Harvard represented a time of major innovation for the University. He focused on equality of opportunity and removing all financial obligation from students with family incomes below $60,000 a year. He launched a major effort to make Boston, and Cambridge in particular, the global leader in life sciences research, with the formation of major programs for stem cell research and genomics. Perhaps most importantly, he led efforts to renew Harvard College with dramatic increases in study abroad programs, faculty-student contact, and collaboration across the University during his tenure.

Currently, Dr. Summers is the President Emeritus and the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, where he became a full professor at age 28, one of the youngest in Harvard’s recent history. He directs the University’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. Summers was the first social scientist to receive the National Science Foundation’s Alan Waterman Award for scientific achievement and, in 1993, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the most outstanding economist under 40 in the United States. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. He has published more than 150 papers in scholarly journals.

Summers chairs the board of the Center for Global Development and serves as vice chair of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and as a board member or advisory board member to a number of other non-profits and public policy organizations. He is a contributor to Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. He is an advisor to businesses and investors and serves on the board of Square, States Title/Doma and SkillSoft Corporation. He also consults with or advises a range of companies in the finance and technology sector, including D. E. Shaw & Co and Citi.

He has co-chaired major international panels ranging from the G20s High Level Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response to the Council on Foreign Relations study group on the Transatlantic Relationship to the Center for American Progress’ Commission on Inclusive Prosperity. He launched a Task Force on Fiscal Policy with Mayor Bloomberg and chaired the Commission on Global Health, lauded by the UN Secretary General who noted that it “will bring more than health – it will bring equity, and contribute to a life of dignity for all.”

President Bill Clinton said that Larry Summers “has the rare ability to see the world that is taking shape and the skill to help to bring it into being.” He has been recognized as one of the world’s most influential thinkers by Time, Foreign Policy, Prospect and The Economist magazines among many others. In his speeches, television appearances, newspaper columns and public commentary, he continues to move forward the debate on national and global economic policy.

John Boehner's Biography

A former small businessman, John Boehner served as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives for nearly five years (January 2011-October 2015), during which he led the drive for a smaller, less costly, and more accountable federal government. Boehner represented the Eighth Congressional District of Ohio in the U.S. House from 1991 to 2015. He now serves as Senior Strategic Advisor for Squire Patton Boggs LLP, one of the world’s foremost law and public policy firms.

The son of a bartender and second oldest of 12 brothers and sisters, John grew up mopping floors at the family tavern and playing football at Cincinnati’s Moeller High School. While working to pay his way through Xavier University, he met Debbie – his wife of 41 years – and started his own small business. He and Debbie still live in the home where they raised their two daughters, Lindsay and Tricia. John got involved in state and local government after seeing firsthand how high taxes and red tape impact entrepreneurs. Then in 1990, the voters sent John to the U.S. House, where he took a strong stand against pork-barrel spending and, as part of the reform-minded “Gang of Seven,” forced the closure of the scandal-ridden House Bank and House Post Office.

John’s reputation as a reformer grew as he worked alongside then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), helping to craft the historic 1994 Contract with America and helping to lead the effort to enact the first balanced federal budget in a generation. Later, as Chairman of the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, he wrote legislation to expand school choice, strengthen America’s pension system, and reform the federal education bureaucracy to demand results for students and parents. Elected as House Majority Leader in 2006 and chosen to become House Republican Leader later that year, Boehner led the opposition to job-crushing proposals such as President Obama’s “cap and trade” initiative and ObamaCare while promoting better solutions to the challenges facing American families. On January 5, 2011, Boehner took the gavel as Speaker of the House following the historic 2010 election in which Congressional Republicans, under Boehner’s leadership, picked up 63 seats in the U.S. House. Guided by the Pledge to America – a new governing agenda reflecting the priorities of the American people – Speaker Boehner focused on removing government barriers to private-sector job creation and economic growth, addressing the drivers of America’s debt, eliminating pork-barrel “earmarks” and reforming Congress, and rebuilding the bonds of trust between the American people and their representatives in Washington.

Boehner, who became a first-time grandfather during the summer of 2015, left the United States Congress on October 31, 2015, after nearly 25 years of serving the people of Ohio’s 8th Congressional District and the nation. Boehner joined Squire Patton Boggs in the autumn of 2016 as the firm’s Senior Strategic Advisor.  In this role, he provides strategic advice to Squire Patton Boggs’ clients in the U.S. and abroad, and focuses on global business development.

His new book On The House: A Washington Memoir released in the Spring of 2021.