m***@true.slant.now
2009-06-09 08:45:18 UTC
Let's Get It Straight, Hank Paulsen Is a Prick Who Took Down the
Economy
By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant. Posted June 9, 2009.
The Wall Street Journal lets a former Goldman Sachs employee write a
power-worshipping ode to Bush's disastrous Treasury Secretary.
"Hank Paulson is a national hero. I said it last October and I'm
sticking by it. And now, there's actual evidence to back me up. The
TARP bailout worked. The Wall Street crisis is over." -- by Evan
Newmark from "Mean Street: It's Time to Enshrine Hank Paulson as
National Hero" -- Wall Street Journal.
So here's the letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal after reading
Evan Newmark's paean to Hank Paulson last week:
Dear WSJ,
Just out of curiosity -- did Evan Newmark ever work for Goldman,
Sachs? And if the answer to the question is yes, don't you think that
might have been a good fact to disclose before he fellated Hank
Paulson in his "Mean Street" column?
Sincerely,
Matt Taibbi
Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you'd have to be
to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front
that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write
a lengthy article calling your former boss a "national hero" -- in the
middle of a sweeping financial crisis, one in which half the world is
in a panic and the unemployment rate just hit a 25-year high? Behavior
like this, you usually don't see it outside prison trusties who spend
their evenings shining the guards' boots. I can't even think of a
political press secretary who would sink that low. Hank Paulson, a
hero? Are you fucking kidding us?
Exactly what part of Paulson's record is heroic, Evan? The part where
he called up SEC director William Donaldson in 2004 and quietly
arranged to get the state to drop capital requirements for the
country's top five investment banks? You remember that business,
right, Evan? Your hero Paulson met with Donaldson and got the rules
changed so that Goldman and four other banks no longer had to abide by
the old restrictions that forced banks to actually have a dollar or
two on hand for every ten or so they lent out. After that, it was
party time! Bear Stearns in just a few years had a debt-to-equity
ration of 33-1! Lehman's went to 32-1. By an amazing coincidence, both
of these companies exploded just a few years after that meeting, and
all of the rest of us, Evan, ended up footing the bill, thanks to a
state-sponsored rescue of Bear and a much larger massive bailout of
Wall Street in general, necessitated in large part by the damage
caused by the chaos surrounding Lehman's collapse.
Meanwhile your own Goldman, Sachs ended up with a 22:1 debt-to-equity
ratio a few years following that meeting, a number that would have
been much higher if one didn't count the hedges Goldman bought through
a company called AIG. Thanks in large part to Paulson's leadership in
his last years as head of Goldman, the company was so massively
over-leveraged that it would have gone under if AIG -- which owed
Goldman billions when it went into its death spiral last September --
had been allowed to collapse. But thanks to Hank Paulson, who
heroically stepped in and gave AIG $80 billion the same weekend he
allowed one of Goldman's last key competitors, Lehman, to collapse,
Goldman didn't have to go without that money; $13 billion of the AIG
bailout went straight to Goldman. So I guess we have Paulson to thank
for the fact that he used about $13 billion of our taxpayer money to
essentially bail out his own fuckups. I mean, that's heroism if I've
ever seen it. Audie Murphy has nothing on that. Sit your asses back
down, Harriet Tubman, Thomas More, Gandhi and Jesus Christ. Hank
Paulson is in the house!
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.
Economy
By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant. Posted June 9, 2009.
The Wall Street Journal lets a former Goldman Sachs employee write a
power-worshipping ode to Bush's disastrous Treasury Secretary.
"Hank Paulson is a national hero. I said it last October and I'm
sticking by it. And now, there's actual evidence to back me up. The
TARP bailout worked. The Wall Street crisis is over." -- by Evan
Newmark from "Mean Street: It's Time to Enshrine Hank Paulson as
National Hero" -- Wall Street Journal.
So here's the letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal after reading
Evan Newmark's paean to Hank Paulson last week:
Dear WSJ,
Just out of curiosity -- did Evan Newmark ever work for Goldman,
Sachs? And if the answer to the question is yes, don't you think that
might have been a good fact to disclose before he fellated Hank
Paulson in his "Mean Street" column?
Sincerely,
Matt Taibbi
Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you'd have to be
to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front
that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write
a lengthy article calling your former boss a "national hero" -- in the
middle of a sweeping financial crisis, one in which half the world is
in a panic and the unemployment rate just hit a 25-year high? Behavior
like this, you usually don't see it outside prison trusties who spend
their evenings shining the guards' boots. I can't even think of a
political press secretary who would sink that low. Hank Paulson, a
hero? Are you fucking kidding us?
Exactly what part of Paulson's record is heroic, Evan? The part where
he called up SEC director William Donaldson in 2004 and quietly
arranged to get the state to drop capital requirements for the
country's top five investment banks? You remember that business,
right, Evan? Your hero Paulson met with Donaldson and got the rules
changed so that Goldman and four other banks no longer had to abide by
the old restrictions that forced banks to actually have a dollar or
two on hand for every ten or so they lent out. After that, it was
party time! Bear Stearns in just a few years had a debt-to-equity
ration of 33-1! Lehman's went to 32-1. By an amazing coincidence, both
of these companies exploded just a few years after that meeting, and
all of the rest of us, Evan, ended up footing the bill, thanks to a
state-sponsored rescue of Bear and a much larger massive bailout of
Wall Street in general, necessitated in large part by the damage
caused by the chaos surrounding Lehman's collapse.
Meanwhile your own Goldman, Sachs ended up with a 22:1 debt-to-equity
ratio a few years following that meeting, a number that would have
been much higher if one didn't count the hedges Goldman bought through
a company called AIG. Thanks in large part to Paulson's leadership in
his last years as head of Goldman, the company was so massively
over-leveraged that it would have gone under if AIG -- which owed
Goldman billions when it went into its death spiral last September --
had been allowed to collapse. But thanks to Hank Paulson, who
heroically stepped in and gave AIG $80 billion the same weekend he
allowed one of Goldman's last key competitors, Lehman, to collapse,
Goldman didn't have to go without that money; $13 billion of the AIG
bailout went straight to Goldman. So I guess we have Paulson to thank
for the fact that he used about $13 billion of our taxpayer money to
essentially bail out his own fuckups. I mean, that's heroism if I've
ever seen it. Audie Murphy has nothing on that. Sit your asses back
down, Harriet Tubman, Thomas More, Gandhi and Jesus Christ. Hank
Paulson is in the house!
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.