Let's Get It Straight, Hank Paulsen Is a Prick Who Took Down the Economy

By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant. Posted June 9, 2009.

Or maybe it was Paulson's foresight in heading off the crisis before it happened that inspired you? Maybe it was the way Paulson pronounced the subprime fallout "contained" in 2007 and called the economy the "strongest in decades?" Or maybe it was the way he remained calm last July, saying that it was a "very manageable situation" and "our regulators are on top of it?" Remember how he said all that shit, Evan, just about six weeks before the world exploded? Remember that Henry Paulson was actually in charge of regulating the financial environment during the last years of the crisis and did nothing as his buddies on Wall Street built one gigantic mountain of leverage after another, gashing underwriting standards across the board, saddling the country with a generation of toxic assets that all of the rest of us will be paying for in taxes (instead of, for instance, a health care program, which we can now no longer afford) for the next fifty fucking years? Do you remember that part?

Or was it his non-intervention last summer when gas prices hit $4.50 a gallon thanks again to his old buddies at Goldman and Morgan Stanley, who juiced the commodities market with so much speculative cash that oil prices soared despite the fact that supply was up and demand was down all year? Do you remember that part? How about the way food prices soared thanks to the same commodities speculators? According to the World Food Program at the UN, about 100 million people joined the ranks of the hungry last year during the commodities spike.

Or maybe it was the way the Treasury Department refused to tell the Congress really anything at all about how it chose whom to give TARP money to; how when the Congressional Oversight Panel asked Paulson what criteria he was using to decide who gets bailout money and who doesn't, he sent Congress back a copy of a TARP application form. Maybe it was that. Or maybe it was the way Paulson got a $200 million tax deferral thanks to an obscure rule that allows executives who join the government to defer taxes on their holdings. That means that not only did Paulson use billions of our money to bail out his own mistakes, he managed to use a loophole to get out of paying his fair share of that same bailout.

Even if it weren't about five years too early to make any kind of judgment at all about whether or not TARP helped, the notion that Henry Paulson is a hero is complete and utter madness because TARP would never have been necessary if someone, anyone who wasn't a greed-addled incompetent like Paulson had actually been regulating the economy in the last years of the Bush adminstration. If anyone besides Paulson had been running Goldman Sachs earlier in this decade -- if a person with a serious brain injury had been in his place, for instance, or a horse, or a head of lettuce -- we'd all be better off today, because there wouldn't be so many toxic Goldman-underwritten mortgage-backed CDOs on the market. We, all of us, are paying the freight for assholes like Paulson, and like you, for that matter. And while we're getting over it, slowly, you're really not helping when you open your mouth and pat yourself on the back for all the good deeds you've done. Spare, us, okay? Just give it up.

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Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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