Brad DeLong has an excellent piece distinguishing between two views of central banking. There’s the “banking camp,” which sees the central bank’s job as being to secure the stability of the financial system – full stop. OK, maybe also price stability. And then there’s the “macroeconomics camp,” which sees the central bank’s job as being to achieve full employment; banking stability and even price stability are basically means towards that end.

Brad complains that the Fed has ended up being much more in the banking camp than many macroeconomists would have wanted. See, for example, the harsh criticisms leveled at the Bank of Japan by one Ben Bernanke in 2000, criticisms that apply almost perfectly to the Bernanke Fed of today.

But I think Brad casts his net too narrowly: it’s not just central bankers who fall into these two camps. And one important consequence of this division is an utterly different read on recent history.

Ask yourself: How well did we respond to the crisis of 2008?

If you’re in the banking camp, here’s what you see:

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The financial system was in great danger – but catastrophe was averted. We’re heroes!

On the other hand, if you’re in the macroeconomics camp, here’s what you see:

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A catastrophic collapse in employment, with only a modest recovery even after all these years. (It looks a bit better if you adjust for an aging population, but not much). We blew it!

Which brings us to what looks more and more like Obama’s decision to choose Larry Summers as Fed chair, passing over Janet Yellen.

As of right now, Summers is clearly not in the banking camp; the stuff he has been writing about fiscal policy makes it clear that he very much believes that the job of economic recovery is not done. On that basis, you would expect him to prod the Fed into doing much more than it is. On the other hand, given Bernanke’s pre-Fed record you would have expected the same thing — maybe even more so, because Bernanke had strongly emphasized the central bank’s responsibility for economic growth. Once at the Fed, however, Bernanke appears to have been assimilated by the Borg, moving much closer to the banking camp.

Would the same thing happen to Summers? I worry. And one of the strong (though probably futile at this point) arguments for Yellen is that she spent years at the Fed without being assimilated, never losing sight of the crucial importance of employment.

While Summers isn’t in the banking camp, however, Obama is. As Ezra Klein explains, his choice of Summers clearly reflects his view that policy in 2009-2010 was a great success, not a big disappointment, and he wants to keep the winning team together.

Of course, it’s a lot easier for Obama to consider his policies a success given that he was reelected.

Obviously I’m in the macroeconomics camp, not the banking camp, so this is all depressing, in several senses. It means, among other things, that even if Summers is the right choice — which we’ll never really know — it’s a choice that Obama is making for all the wrong reasons.