On The Other Hand...

Forget the Larry Summers drama (if there is any) for a second. Obama also appointed Berkeley professor Christina Romer to head his Council of Economic Advisers. Romer is well-known in economic circles and is popular with both Democrats and Republicans (a lot of Obama's appointments are popular with both parties, aren't they?):

Romer has described herself as having “liberal Obama-heavy political views," but her work has drawn support from both parties.

She burst into the economic scene with her doctoral dissertation that fundamentally changed how economists viewed the Great Depression.

Economics data indicated that the business cycle before the Great Depression was much more volatile than the economy after World War II. Economists widely assumed the data demonstrated the success of the post-Depression stabilization policies. Romer proved them wrong by showing that what seemed like a decrease in market volatility was really due to improved data collection.

Since then, she’s done extensive work researching the causes of the Great Depression and the roles that fiscal and monetary policy played in the country’s economic recovery. More recently, she has focused on the impact of tax policy on economic growth in papers co-authored with her husband.

So she's an expert on the Great Depression, which is the only thing close to the crisis we're in right now. This strikes me as an excellent pick, Mr. President-elect.