Henry Paulson

By nospam@example.com (Karl Denninger) Intentional lobbying for (by Henry Paulson when he was with Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary), the granting of, and then full utilization of ever-increasing leverage.  As noted above every single one of the large bank and bank-style institutions that has failed had mo...

By nospam@example.com (Karl Denninger) Section 13(3) of The Federal Reserve Act allows The Fed to lend to anyone under "unusual and exigent circumstances."  But this was not a loan.  It was a pass-through payment to Goldman Sachs and other banks for credit-default swaps that were in fact functionally worthless, as AIG was func...

By Huff TV Arianna recently appeared on BBC's Newsnight to discuss the the economic crisis, the lack of reform, and the effects of the bailout on American society... Arianna recently appeared on BBC's Newsnight to discuss the the economic crisis, the lack of reform, and the effects of the bailout on A...

By Michael Shedlock(noreply@blogger.com) The case against Bernanke was weaker because of Bernanke's selective memory. When confronted by Congress with his role in this mess, Bernanke defense was that he did not remember what he said and Paulson called Bank of America a "Turd in the Punchbowl". Bank of America / Merrill Lynch Recap

By letters@smartmoney.com (SmartMoney.com) I Want to Take You Higher Numbers are getting higher by the day when it comes to talk of a government bailout on the subprime crisis. The Bush administration lays out its plan, in three succinct pages, to bail out financial institutions. What it wants: $700 billion to buy up distressed mortga...

The Distress Test After a horrific week on Wall Street, the question in Washington seems to be: Can what you don’t know not hurt you? With fears that the U.S. economy is at a precipice, Bush administration officials go to Congress and ask for carte blanche in buying billions of dollars in dist...

By letters@smartmoney.com (SmartMoney.com) Huge Government Bailout Envisioned on Mortgages Remember the Resolution Trust Corporation? The RTC was the government entity created to buy up government group assembled to take over assets from failed savings and loans in the early 1990s. Now it could serve as a model for a government b...

FreeRateUpdate.com Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was adamantly opposed to having the government step in to save Lehman. No other bank stepped forward, either. ... Series Overview: Examining The Financial CrisisNPR Kentucky.com all 252 news articles »

satire) Henry Paulson Has A Protein Spill, And Say Goodbye To Snail Mail satire) OVERRIPE GOSSIP FRUIT: In February 2008, Goldman Sachs Playmate of the Year HENRY PAULSON was chatting amiably with some sod from Vanity Fair, when, ...

Much of the criticism has been aimed at former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the onetime chief executive of Goldman Sachs who was aided at Treasury by a ... Geithner: No favoritism to Goldman during crisisUSA Today all 60 news articles »

June 29th, 2009 Paulson to testify July 16 about BofA-Merrill dealWASHINGTON — Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will testify next month before a ... and more »

By Michael Shedlock(noreply@blogger.com) At a meeting that evening Secretary Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Lewis, Bank of America's CFO, and other officials discussed the issues surrounding invocation of the MAC clause by Bank of America. The Federal officials asked Bank of America not to invoke the MAC unti...

Lewis now says he did so only because Henry Paulson threatened him -- if he didn't comply, he was outta there. And now Paulson is saying that he only threatened Lewis because Ben Bernanke told him to. Aaron Sorkin's plot in "AFGM," meanwhile, ...

By nospam@example.com (Karl Denninger) Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Department chief Henry Paulson pressured Bank of America Corp. to not discuss its increasingly troubled plan to buy Merrill Lynch & Co. -- a deal that later triggered a government bailout of BofA -- according to testimony by Ke...

By Don McNay The outrage over the AIG bonuses has been a landmark for the American people. A lot of officials in Washington and on Wall Street would have been happy to let the bonuses be paid quietly. The current Treasury Secretary was for that idea.

By Dean Baker This set of events has led almost everyone to conclude that the trio who let Lehman go under -- Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and the then-head of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner -- erred badly in this decision. That seems a reasonable judgment.

By nospam@example.com (Karl Denninger) The bigger story, however, is how Bernanke and Paulson ruined this nation.  How they poisoned the well by lying repeatedly to the American People and Congress, destroying trust between everyone who comes before Congress and Congress.

By Alan Schram The Treasury's policy did nothing to build confidence or stabilize the markets. The precipitous drop of the equity markets in October and November are the market's judgment on their policies. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made some disastrous decisions that had major unintended co...

By SusanG When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking...

President Bush on Monday said, "The Secretary and I share the concerns of our citizens, concerns about jobs, concerns about their savings accounts. This is a tough situation for America. But we'll recover from it. And the first step to recovery is to safeguard our financial system."

By nospam@example.com (Karl Denninger) Trillions of dollars off-balance-sheet? WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe said Saturday that Congress was not told the truth about the bailout of the nation's financial system and should take back what is left of the $700 billion "blank check'' it gave the Bush administration.

Like pigs at the trough, banks are lining up for the billions of dollars made available to them under the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Originally conceived as a mechanism to purchase toxic mortgage assets, bailout czar Henry Paulson announced last week he's offic...

By Andrew(noreply@blogger.com) Many new supplicants are lining up for an infusion of capital as billions of dollars are channeled to other beneficiaries like the American International Group, and possibly soon American Express. Then again, I never thought we'd see a Democratic Congress hand over hundreds of billion...

By nospam@example.com (Karl Denninger) We are literally on the precipice of a full-on meltdown despite what the talking heads are saying.  Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke came to you and the rest of Congress about a month ago and said they would "fix it" by buying up illiquid assets. 

By Mark Thoma 15:30 *PAULSON SAYS MARKET TURMOIL WON'T ABATE UNTIL HOUSING REBOUNDS In a similar vein, we are seeing increasing interest in support consumer access to credit. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson today announced that TARP is no longer about troubled assets:

By Andrew Leonard Furthermore, I think, as a nation, we're better off owning stock in the banks that we are injecting capital in, rather than owning toxic assets that are probably never going to be worth their original valuations. I can envision a future in which Citigroup and JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs end...

The letter increases pressure on the administration of George W. Bush to take action as he prepares to hand power to president-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 20. Obama said yesterday that policy options to help the industry will be a “high priority” for his transition team.

By Michael Shedlock(noreply@blogger.com) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent to send a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson urging him to assist the Big Three auto makers by considering broadening the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program to help the troubled industry.

By Nancy Scola When, six weeks ago, United States Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asked Congress to entrust him with $700 billion of the people's money, the American public reacted with so many questions, comments, and concerns that web traffic swamped many of the sites offering Capitol Hill cover...

By Leo W. Gerard Paulson cheated American taxpayers with his initial expenditure from that $700 billion Wall Street bailout fund -- the $125 billion he gave to nine financial institutions. Now Paulson is no rube. He's a former Goldman Sachs CEO, who has surrounded himself with former Goldman Sachs execu...

By Kevin Phillips The policies that Paulson and Bernanke did implement at such staggering cost have only begun to do their full long-term damage, which will probably come in a round of even more serious inflation. Kevin Phillips's new book is Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Cri...

By Dave Zirin In the United States, politicians drill into our heads that there is no money for healthcare, no money for infrastructure and no money for schools. But thanks to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, we now know that there is cash aplenty for bailing out his brethren on Wall Street.

By Blake Hounshell Broader economic recovery will not happen right away," cautioned Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in a closely watched speech in New York. McCain especially hammered Obama on "Joe the plumber," a voter and small business owner the Democratic nominee met in Ohio.

By Rob Kall Today's Wall Street Journal reports how Henry Paulson summoned the heads of the top banks in America to meet with him on Monday. On one side of the table sat Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, flanked by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman She...

By The Huffington Post News Editors WASHINGTON — Confidence and cash will restore the economy's health, but it will take time and patience, too, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday. The needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it," Paulso...

By Howard A. Rodman When the world was about to cave in; when Hank Paulson assured us that the only way to keep the world from caving in was... Various members of Congress, for various reasons, balked. (Or, as Sarah would say: blinked.) And in reaction: the market tanked.

By Joe Conason The failure to pass bailout legislation reflected a political system as bereft of confidence as the financial markets. President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had no credibility to match the arrogance of their initial demand for absolute power in distributing $70...

By Howard A. Rodman Alas, after all of the sturm und drang of yesterday, the most likely outcome is the saddest one as the markets are already predicting: sometime later this week, we get some version of the original Paulson plan, with a couple of stupid sops to the "free-market" Republicans. (Nabokov once sa...

I'm sure that Obama and the Democrats would have cited such reassurances as proof that the Republicans are "out of touch" with "reality". But if I might paraphrase John McCain: I'd rather lose an election than see America in a severe recession.

By Blake Hounshell The bill, despite intense lobbying by President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, lost on a 228-205 vote as rank-and-file members in each party -- primarily Republicans -- broke with their leadership to oppose it on ideological grounds.

By Blake Hounshell We sent a message to Wall Street - the party is over," declared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "If we don't pass it, we shouldn't be a Congress," added New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have offered tepid, carefully hedged support for the bailout plan.

As banking and financial stocks lead the overall indexes down into bear-market territory, Fed head Ben Bernanke and Treasury man Henry Paulson are testifying today before Barney Frank’s House Financial Services Committee on ways and means to reform all manner of bank and securities d...

By address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Absurdist Republic) Will the Fed’s Ben Bernanke tough it out, following in the footsteps of Paul Volcker in the early 1980s and refuse to bail out Wall Street? Or will Paulson persuade him to come to the rescue of his greedy and dissembling buddies, as Greenspan did when he rescued Long Term Credit Management i...

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson visits China this week amid concerns over their exported goods.

By Steve Bainbridge From the Journal:Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, concerned that regulators may not be best positioned to properly oversee fast-moving capital markets, said he is launching an internal review to recommend changes to the regulatory system. To maintain our capital markets' leaders...

WASHINGTON Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday that he personally initiated his departments role in a Supreme Court case that could hurt shareholders efforts to recover losses in securities fraud lawsuits.

By Steve Bainbridge In the W$J, Ted explains why this securities fraud case pending before the US Supreme Court is of momentous import:Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called securities litigation the Achilles heel for our economy, endangering the global competitiveness of American financial market...

President Bush on Monday said, "Hank comes to his position with a lifetime of experience in business and finance. He has an intimate knowledge of global markets. He will work to keep this economy of ours competitive and growing, and he will work to ensure fair treatment for America's goods a...

Investment bankers are making bigger bets with their own assets than ever before, gambling that huge returns will make up for losses when things turn ugly. BusinessWeek Executive Editor John Byrne and investment banking editor Emily Thornton talk about how the skills that Treasury Sec...