At this point it looks like George W. Bush is running the economy in the same way he ran the war in Iraq.
Hank Paulson ,Paul Bremer, and George Tenet.
GWB sure can pick ‘em.
kind of high marks, he has not done that well
Yes, Paulson was a disastrous choice for Treasury Secretary. Bush has made some awful blunders in his appointments, and in his failures to clean house.
But I would read it slightly differently, I think Paulson did a lot of this on purpose, especially his sudden announcement of the bailout crisis. He did that to elect Obama, and to work for the powers behind the throne who want to wreck the economy and pick up the pieces cheap.
Bush’s mistake was not to select someone stupid for the treasury job, but but to once again select someone disloyal to him and to our country. Paulson didn’t get to be CEO of Goldman Sachs by being stupid.
I completely agree. Paulsons’ policies will be seen as impoverishing America for a decade. He has absolutely shredded market confidence. In many ways, had his plan actually been to have sabotaged the markets, he could hardly have acted more effectively.
Paulson has been a total disaster. This tree-hugging liberal registered Republican had far too much bias towards (ultra liberal) Goldman which may have helped secure Lehman’s demise.
GW was a Uniter not a divider..according to his poll numbers, he practically united the country against him (ahem)
at first I was willing to give Paulson some slack based on the enormity of the economic problem.
But not anymore. Paulson makes Paul Bremer look like Albert Einstein in crisis management.
A key component in this tangled story is deleveraging. Unfortunately, so much debt was built up in the good times that the deleveraging story has a long way to go. Between 1983 and 2007, the ratio of private credit to GDP in the Group of Seven large industrial economies plus China rose from 92pc to 155pc, according to a Nomura Securities calculation.
Given the headline (which I agree with), I was expecting something different. Instead, we have, almost verbatim, the criticism leveled not from the right, but from the Democrats. The article essentially says that Paulson should have done more of what he did wrong, and less of what little he did right. Not helpful.
“Paulson didn’t do enough”
“Paulson didn’t regulate that market fast enough”
“Paulson didn’t take the first steps toward federalization until blah”
“Paulson didn’t socialize my risk before I lost tons of money from blindly gambling all of my retirement egg, waaaaah”
“Paulson stalled on the national socialism, and now I am down 70%”
If it was *just* a crisis in confidence, then walking out for press conferences shaking in fear, with rhetorical apple juice spilled on your crotch, and suggesting all manner of drastic actions (some involving numbers Americans were NOT used to hearing in any context) probably wasn’t a good idea. If the problems are structural (i.e. a speculative real-estate tumor fueled by benevolent government free-money programs, which then ate through its containers and spread biohazardous waste through the rest of the susceptible, massively-leveraged economy), then even the proposed “solutions” (all of which involve extending the free-money programs in various novel forms - some more transparent than others) merely postpone the reckoning for another cycle - in a form more formidable than what is faced now. You can’t keep digging deeper, but some folks are always keen to suggest a larger shovel.