Daily Inspiration Quote by Lawrence Summers

Summers is doing two things at once here: reaching for the authority of history while warning against the cheap emotional satisfactions that history reliably supplies. “Goes back at least to the Greeks” isn’t a charming classics nod; it’s a way of branding the scapegoat story as ancient, automatic, and therefore suspicious. When panic hits, public anger wants a face, and “speculators” are conveniently legible villains: shadowy, opportunistic, plausibly rich. Summers’ line implies that the villain narrative is less diagnosis than ritual, a civic exorcism that feels like accountability while sidestepping harder questions.

The subtext is also technocratic and defensive. Coming from an economist who has lived through the crises of the ’90s, the dot-com unwind, and the 2008 collapse, Summers is signaling a policy preference: don’t confuse market actors with the market’s architecture. Speculation can amplify volatility, but blaming speculators is “almost always” wrong because it treats symptoms as causes. It suggests you can stabilize finance by punishing the traders, rather than confronting leverage, liquidity mismatches, regulatory blind spots, and the political choices that let risk pile up. It’s a critique of moralizing economics: replacing systemic analysis with a satisfying story about bad people doing bad things.

“Almost always” is the tell. It leaves a narrow escape hatch (yes, manipulation exists) while pushing readers toward a cooler, structural view. The intent isn’t to absolve financiers; it’s to insist that crisis policy can’t be built on catharsis.