The Summers Effect

So our President-elect is in the process of staffing his Cabinet. Hillary Clinton for the State Department, Tom Daschle for Health and Human Services, Robert Gates to be a hold over for the Defense Department... and Larry Summers at the Treasury? Sure, he's held the post before (can you smell "change" in the air?) and has the backing of many in the Congress, but given the economic crisis, I have reservations:

"In 1990, Lithuania, a restive Soviet republic seeking independence, hired Summers to advise on that country's economic transformation. Poor Lithuania had no idea what it got itself into. This was Summers's first opportunity to tackle a country in economic crisis and put his wunderkind theories into practice. The results were literally suicidal: in 1990, when Summers first arrived, Lithuania's suicide rate was 26.1 per 100,000 and falling. Just five years after Summers got his hands on Lithuania's economy, life became so unbearable under the economic transition that the suicide rate nearly doubled to 45.6 per 100,000, worse than any other ex-Soviet republic in transition. In fact, it was the highest suicide rate in the world, suggesting something particularly harsh and brutal about the economic transition in that country as opposed to the others, where suffering and pain were common. Things got so bad that in 1992, after just two years of Summers-nomics, the traumatized Lithuanians voted the communist party back into power, the first East European nation to do so--even though just a year earlier Lithuanians actually died on the streets fighting communism."
-Mark Ames, The Summers Conundrum