Larry Summers' White House Role Questioned As Economic Policy Shifts

As President Obama and his team have rolled out a fresh set of strategies to fix the economy, one item on the list - curbing the ability of big banks to gamble in the stock market - has been viewed by some as a repudiation of Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president who is the White House's chief economic adviser.

Summers, who favored bank deregulation when he was secretary of the treasury for President Clinton, had counseled Obama for much of last year to take a less sweeping approach to overhauling bank rules. But that point of view publicly fell out of favor last month as the White House adopted a more red meat, populist tone after angry Massachusetts voters sent Republican Scott Brown to fill the US Senate seat that was held by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

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