Summers has plenty of other things figured out as well, including the origins of the current financial crisis, for which he has crafted a cogent explanation worthy of his reputation as a policy wonk and his days as a college debating champion at M.I.T. “I think crises like this get made by multiple cascading misjudgments,” he explains, and then catalogues them: too much government spending, not enough private-sector saving, too much dependence on foreign debt, too much demand for “riskless” financial instruments that weren’t, in fact, riskless …

By the time he’s finished, he’s barely breathing, the words are tumbling from his mouth so quickly. But then he sums it all up in his trademark way of making the complexities of economics and finance comprehensible to mere mortals: “The classic stories about markets are where, if the market for wheat goes down, people plant a little wheat. People demand to eat a little more bread, and the thing self-stabilizes. But it was [economist John Maynard] Keynes’s central insight that it’s not always that way. And it’s not always that way in particular because leverage [i.e., borrowing] can create situations where, when prices fall, then people have to sell, and so they fall faster. When asset prices fall, capital values fall, and, therefore, people are in less of a position to lend, and, therefore, other people are forced to sell. And there’s a whole set of these vicious cycles. You can also have a change in gestalt where people who had perceived things as safe all of a sudden move things from the concept of being safe to the concept of being risky, and if they’re risky, they don’t want to hold them. And so you see a large scale of abandonment. And I think in one way or another the leverage, the vicious cycle, the change in gestalt, the unwinding—that’s the financial crisis.”

Summers had a pretty good handle on the crisis even as it was unfolding. Ten days before the collapse of Bear Stearns, in March 2008, he said in a speech at Stanford University, “We are facing the most serious combination of macro-economic and financial stresses that the U.S. has faced in a generation and possibly much longer.”

But while the housing and mortgage bubbles were busy inflating a few years back, Summers was convalescing after his tortured departure as Harvard’s president, in June 2006. He had resigned that February in the face of a second no-confidence vote the Harvard faculty was prepared to deliver. The first had come a year earlier, following his impolitic and ill-advised—but severely taken out of context—comments about a lack of scientific aptitude among women. Summers had spoken at a private conference from notes, so there is no transcript of the speech. But afterward an M.I.T. professor provided snippets of it to a Boston Globe reporter, and a media frenzy ensued. Summers told The Harvard Crimson, “Everyone agrees that working toward gender equity is vitally important,” and discrimination must be faced “head-on.” But, he said, academics must also conduct “careful, honest, and rigorous research” to understand why women are too often under-represented in certain professions. “My speculations were intended to contribute to that process,” he said, but he has also admitted making the speech was a mistake.

That wasn’t his only mistake at Harvard. In fact, people there have so many complaints about him it is difficult to know where to begin. Along with his ambitions to vastly expand the campus into Allston, displacing working-class residents from an affordable neighborhood, and to revamp the undergraduate curriculum by boosting the role given to the sciences, he also was said to have insulted, in addition to women, many of the diverse communities at the school—from blacks to gays to Hispanics. He was criticized for his uncouth per­sonal style—from toothpicks dangling from his mouth to stocking feet up on his desk during meetings—for cutting off questioners in midstream, and for his tendency to look right through people while they talk. There was also his tone-deaf willingness to autograph for students dollar bills that already had his signature on them (from when he was Treasury secretary) and to replace his predecessor’s “aging Lincoln” with a brand-new Town Car. “That shiny black sedan soon started popping up all over campus, with Summers’s chauffeur waiting patiently inside, sometimes for hours at a time,” wrote Summers’s erstwhile biographer, Richard Bradley, who chonicled many of Summers’s perceived foibles at the university and elsewhere in Boston magazine and in his 2005 book, Harvard Rules.