Marlow’s Listener

classical music is not a wonder of the human world, it’s a repellent against mildly anti-social behavior

Magnitude 8.8 – OFFSHORE MAULE, CHILE

Monstrous big, but 50 years ago, a 9.5 in the same region.

Defense lawyers know how important it is to try to counter the initial wave of negative publicity about their clients, especially corporate chieftains who are often perceived by the public as guilty until proven innocent.

The Court of Public Opinion is not necessarily the same tribunal before which a defendant must defend himself or herself.

Ben Bernacke, Tim Geitner and Sheila Bair are still in office, but Hank (the “Tank”) Paulson is on the beach and the newly published author of this inside-the-Beltway first-person I-was-there.

So, what do you get the man who has everything? We can safely assume that Paulson, the CEO of Goldman Sachs at the time, was well enough compensated that he entered public service in 2006 as Secretary of the Treasury in search of something other than the paycheck or the nicely appointed office.

What he got was enough grief to give him the dry heaves. A lesser man would have settled for a coronory.

Specificlaly, between March and December 2008, he got to cope with the sudden collapse of Bear Stearns, the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and in the month of September, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the bug splat on the windshield of AIG, the euthenasia of WaMu, the shotgun weddings of BoA/Merrill and Wells/Wachovia, the near-death experience of Morgan Stanley and their flight, with Goldman, to the relative safety of becoming bank holding companies, followed by gut-wrenching volatility in the stock markets, the freeze in credit (GE couldn’t sell commercial paper!), the John McCain-to-the-rescue episode, putting Chrysler and GM on temporary life support and an attack of the shorts on the $3 trillion sick-man-of-banking, Citi.

Reading his sometimes plodding account of what happened and who is like watching Neo dodge the bullets. Or Bill Murray having the same all nighter with pizza over and over Groundhog Day style. Paulson doesn’t try to make it sound more complicated than it was, but there’s a lot of wonk stuff that you just want to throw a TARP over. He does a good job of avoiding getting bogged down in the minutae and conveys the seat-of-the-pants DNA-encoding understanding of the market that tells him when things are about to get really ugly, as opposed to just apocalyptical. It’s inescapably a difficult task to explain how this stuff works.

He spends a lot of time giving credit to his fellow superheroes Ben and Tim, to President Bush and then Senator Obama. His criticisms, such as of Senator McCain, are muted but unmistakeable.

The picture he paints, of bluff, plain-spoken Hank, is of a man who didn’t let power go to his head. It’s a memoir, a political memoir, and a proper venue for taking credit and assigning blame, but much of the criticism is self directed.

As much as possible, he stays focused on what happened, when and how and who was involved. It has an immediacy that turns it into a page turner during the second half, even as he describes a messy, all-too-human, legislative process.

As a Fantasy Football exercise, as you read this, try out alternative universes in which different figures sat in Hank’s chair.

Public Law 109-145

When I was a boy, the old man interrupted, life was simple.
When you were a boy, his wife said, you were simple.
Yes, I always had a goal. Always a goal. When I was a little boy, to be a big boy.
When I was a big boy, to be a teenager. When I was a teenager, to be a college man.
When I was a college man, to be a grown man, married, with a job and a mortgage.
And when I was employed, I wanted more. More money, more power, more of me.
When I got all the power and money I was going to get, and sick of heart of me, I craved leisure.
And now? she asked
Now that I have leisure, I don’t know what I want.
Yes, that makes life complicated, doesn’t it?