Larry Summers Says His ‘Secular Stagnation’ Thesis Is Catching On

Larry Summers is a confident man. The Harvard economist says he believes that more and more people are buying into his “secular stagnation” thesis—even though economic growth has dramatically strengthened and interest rates have risen since 2013, when he first sounded the alarm.

Summers, 63, is a past president of Harvard University and a high-ranking official in the presidential administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. He contends that the “natural” rate of interest—the one consistent with stable growth and inflation—has fallen so low in industrialized nations that zero will often be too high: “a chronic and systemic inhibitor of economic activity, holding our economies back below their potential,” as he put it in a speech at an International Monetary Fund research conference in November 2013.