From the category archives:

Henry Paulson

Outrage of the Week: Leadership Abdicated

November 21, 2008

It was a week that illustrated how not to be a leader. The CEOs of the big three auto makers appeared before the United States Congress, and showed a level of ill preparedness on even rudimentary questions about their bailout pleas that would have incurred the ire of a fifth grade teacher.  Their separate arrivals in three [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Paulson and Bernanke Flunk the Confidence Test

November 14, 2008

In a time when the restoration of confidence, perhaps more than even financial liquidity, is paramount in calming markets and providing stability, neither the Treasury secretary nor the chairman of the Fed acquitted themselves well this week. As the war in Iraq unfolded, and then morphed into disaster in its first several years, the world discovered the [...]

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Paulson the Magnificent?

November 12, 2008

The funny thing about prescience, Mr. Secretary, is that it should occasionally bear some relationship to the future, or even just next week. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr’s announcement today of yet another rejiggered financial recovery plan contained enough reversals in direction to make an Olympic swimmer dizzy.  But it was his Carnac statement that [...]

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Tea, Anyone?

October 13, 2008

The British breakthrough, and how it managed to smash the U.S. bailout logjam and get it moving, is just one more of those crazy, topsy-turvy turns on the bumpy road to financial sanity -and another indication that America’s global preeminence is facing some challenges. Finally, a coherent plan seems to be emerging to address some, and [...]

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Would a Sensible Investor Buy into the Bush Bailout Plan?

September 26, 2008

Making bad investment decisions over risky products that people did not fully understand is what brought the United States and Wall Street to the brink. Is another terrible folly about to be repeated, even with echoes of the costs and misadventures of the Iraq war booming loudly across the land? Investors generally like a few details before [...]

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Outrage of the Week: The Hijacking of American Capitalism

September 20, 2008

The promise of this new era of market miracles has been shamefully betrayed by a self-serving collection of greedy CEOs, disengaged directors and regulators who, far from envisioning the new frontier of the global economy, have shown themselves unable to see even into the next week. It was advertised as a sure path to wealth [...]

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AIG Bailout: And Taxpayers Didn’t Get a Guarantee for their $85 Billion?

September 18, 2008

It is bad enough that an insurance company, which should know a thing or two about risk, was so badly run that it needed to have the U.S. government nationalize it to the tune of an $85 billion purchase.  But when the White House admits that taxpayers may not even see their money returned, you [...]

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The Government from Simbirsk*

September 17, 2008

Without a shot being fired or a ballot being cast, the United States government has been overtaken by an act of socialism on a scale that is as incomprehensible as it is shocking.   Now, in addition to being the world’s largest mortgage backer as a result of its takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, [...]

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The Nationalization of Folly

September 10, 2008

Washington’ s takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gained the quick support of Wall Street, who never meets a bailout it doesn’t like, and the thanks of Beijing, whose playbook it seems to be borrowing. Months after U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. reassured the world ‘s markets that “We are closer to [...]

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