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Not in Office, He’ll Now Be in Print

Summers is Financial Times writer; editor says his column will be ‘highly provocative’

Move over, Paul Krugman.

Lawrence H. Summers, after a tumultuous term as Harvard’s president, will see if he fares better as a pundit, writing his own monthly column for the Financial Times (FT).

Kicked out of his Mass Hall office, Summers has found a home across the Atlantic, in the pages of the London-based broadsheet that boasts more than one million readers worldwide.

Summers—in Singapore for the annual summits of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—said last night in a message from his BlackBerry that he expects “to write on subjects relating to political economy.” He added that he is “excited about [the] broad global audience on topics of great import” that the column will afford him.

He said that the column will begin later this month.

The FT’s editor, Lionel Barber, told a fellow London-based daily, The Guardian, last week that Summers’ column “is certain to be widely read and highly provocative and I am very pleased to have him on board.”

Summers, who will stay on as Harvard’s Eliot University professor, is now in the third month of a one-year sabbatical.

He’s also signed on as an occasional contributor to Open University, a blog hosted by the website of The New Republic magazine. He has yet to post on the site.

—Javier C. Hernandez contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu.

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