... financial crises aren’t things which just happen, like asteroids or earthquakes. They have causes — which means that they can also be prevented. Crisis management is an important skill, and it’s one where Larry Summers has a lot of experience. But crisis prevention is the thing which really matters. Summers has demonstrated essentially zero crisis-prevention skills: his deregulatory instincts helped make the financial crisis more likely and more severe when it happened. Mark Carney, to take one obvious example, is a better central banker than Larry Summers will ever be, because he did something vastly more praiseworthy than managing a crisis: he prevented a crisis from ever happening in the first place.

Obama should be bending over backwards to appoint not the candidate who can best manage a financial crisis, but rather the candidate who is most likely to stop a crisis from happening in the first place. That candidate is Janet Yellen. (Or maybe Mark Carney, but he’s taken.)