Mr. Summers, who taught economics and public policy at Harvard while advising Shaw, also met with investors in the United States, as well as in the cash-rich Middle East and Asia. He spoke at industry conferences, mixing with officials from public pension funds, endowments and other large institutions with many billions of dollars to invest.
While at D. E. Shaw, Larry Summers also peered into the inner workings of the $2 trillion hedge fund industry, which the Obama administration is now relying on to buy billions of dollars of worrisome assets from the nation's beleaguered banks.
Some of his critics worry that such ties raise questions about whether the government's ever-changing effort to bolster the financial industry will benefit Wall Street in general, and hedge funds in particular, at the expense of taxpayers.
"This is what might be called contamination," said Andrew Sabl, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Did Summers spend so much time with the hedge fund, or its investors, sovereign wealth funds and so on, that he started to think like them?"
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