Best and brightest: This is America. It's different.

NYT's Sheryl Gay Stolberg today:

And given his experience with the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s, some economists wonder how [Larry Summers] could have signed off on a bailout plan that did not force banks to admit that they were insolvent.

“The irony is that Summers and Geithner wrote the textbook on how to manage these crises, and they lectured countries all over the world on what to do,” said Adam S. Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, lamenting that they did not “follow through with their own prescriptions.”