Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, in memoir, recounts an economy ‘on the brink’
The Washington memoir, typically published after a calamitous event or the end of a political campaign, often brings a nugget or two of news. But that’s a tall order for Henry M. Paulson Jr.’s “On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System,” as many authors have already published thick tomes examining the financial crisis of fall 2008.
As Treasury secretary, Paulson helped oversee the government’s intervention, and his memoir is the first lengthy account of the crisis from a key decision maker. The book, which is set to hit bookstores Monday, offers a look at Paulson’s thinking during those scary days, as well as his sometimes unvarnished opinions of other Washington characters, many of whom had central roles in managing the government’s response.
Paulson writes that then-Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, called him routinely, starting with the weekend that the government seized mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson was impressed with Obama as well as his vice presidential candidate, Sen. Joseph Biden, but less so by their Republican counterparts.
After talking to Obama, Paulson called Sen. John McCain, in an effort to appear politically balanced, but the Republican candidate “had little more to say as I described the actions we had taken and why.”
McCain put Sarah Palin on the line, but from the start, she and Paulson did not mesh well.
“Right away she started calling me Hank. Now, everyone calls me Hank. My assistant calls me Hank. Everyone on my staff, from top to bottom, calls me Hank. It’s what I like. But for some reason, the way she said it over the phone like that, even through we’d never met, rubbed me the wrong way,” Paulson writes. “I’m not sure she grasped the full dimensions of the situation I had sketched out.”
Not surprisingly, Paulson is effusive in his praise of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and then-New York Fed President Timothy F. Geithner, who were his partners in most of the major decisions in formulating the government response. But the former Treasury secretary has more modulated views on other key government officials in the legislative branch as well as the executive branch, with whom he worked to gain new powers and take steps to bail out financial firms.
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