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Hank's Book - My Take
- Alt-A
- Ben Bernanke
- Ben Bernanke
- Capital Markets
- Corporate Finance
- Exchange Stabilization Fund
- Fannie Mae
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
- Federal Financing Bank
- Fox Business
- Freddie Mac
- Ginnie Mae
- Hank Paulson
- Hank Paulson
- headlines
- James Lockhart
- Neel Kashkari
- Post Office
- TARP
- Tim Geithner
- Warren Buffett
If the financial history of the globe is a topic of interest to you Hank Paulson’s new book, On The Brink
is a must read. Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke were central parts of
that part of our history, but after reading this book you come away
with the conclusion that it was Paulson who was pulling the strings
every inch of the way.
There were some aspects of the book that I found to be not credible;
there was one critical section that I thought the facts were a bit
distorted. I think there was one part of the story that was omitted. As
a result I was left questioning how many other aspects of this story
were ‘skewed’.
Start with what I think is an indisputable fact. Hank Paulson is one of
the smartest financial guys in the world. He is one of the top
investment bankers; he knows debt and corporate finance as well as
anyone. Throughout his book Hank demonstrates his knowledge and
establishes the fact that he knows everyone in the game on a first name
basis.
Given that as a backdrop I have issues with the credibility of the following sections of the book:
I) What did he know (suspect) and when did he know it?
On August 17, 2006 the newly appointed TSec. Met in Camp David with
president Bush and his economic team. At that meeting Paulson said
“If you look at recent history, there is a disturbance in the capital markets every four to eight years”.
Hank added in the book, “I was convinced we were due for another disruption”.
Hank was a very much a hands on CEO at GS before becoming TSec. He was
a big risk taker, but he was very measured in his bets. I think it is
important to look at GS’s record in the years preceding 2006 as a clue
to Paulson’s thinking.
In the 2003-2006 periods Wall Street was coining money in
originating/packaging and distributing Sub Prime and Alt-A mortgages.
In those same years GS consistently ranked last or next to last on the
league tables of how much of this business was done. If GS wanted to be
#1 in this business they could have been. They had the brains, the
balance sheet and the moxie. So for me this is a sign that the senior
management at GS took a hard look at a big money making operation and
said, “This one is going to stink, let’s keep a low profile”.
I think that Paulson was a big factor in steering GS away from the junk
mortgage pitfall that ended up killing the competition. He had made up
his mind on this issue years before the August 06 Camp David meeting.
He saw on a daily basis the absolute junk that was coming from Wall
Street. I maintain that when he spoke he knew in the back of his mind
that the source of the “next financial crisis” he was warning about was
going to be bad mortgages.
If in 2006 Hank had sounded the alarm bell as he had inside of GS there
would have been a different outcome in 08 and 09. There were plenty of
people (including myself) who were looking at the debt that was being
created from the junk and saying, “This is just getting silly”. Paulson
was too smart and too connected to have not seen this. He does not
acknowledge this in his book. He claimed that he smelled trouble, but
did not know where it would come from. I find that hard to believe.
II) The TARP debt for equity Flip Flop
Anyone who knows corporate finance knows that equity is worth 10X’s
more than debt. Paulson knows this from forty years ago. With this in
mind the time line of how the TARP program was shifted to one of buying
distressed assets to buying the equity in the banks is important.
The TARP program was sold to the public and to Congress as a program to
buy toxic assets that were “clogging” the system. Congress agreed to
the $700b program on October 2, 2008. It contained a provision whereby
Treasury could use the funds to acquire equity if necessary, but the
expectations by all were that Treasury would be buying toxic assets and
not common or preferred shares. Ten days later on October 12th Paulson
changed the game and switched from buying trouble mortgages to buying
equity in the banks.
In the book Paulson gives credit to two unlikely sources for the change
in his thinking. Warren Buffet and Ben Bernanke. I think he just used
those two as the basis for the change in plans. They just confirmed
what he wanted do all along. Paulson makes reference to a discussion on
September 30th 2008 with Bernanke:
“Ben Bernanke told me that he thought that solving the crisis
would demand more than illiquid asset purchases”. In Bernanke’s view,
“we would have to inject equity capital into financial institutions”.
So it was Ben that planted the seed for the massive flip flop on the
use of TARP funds. I think the seed was already there and Hank used Ben
to support what he had already concluded.
Nine days after TARP was passed (October 11) Paulson had a phone
conversation with Warren Buffett. During that call Buffett urged
Paulson to consider investing the TARP money in low coupon preferred
stock in the banks as an alternative to buying assets. Paulson
describes this as a ‘eureka’ moment. The point where he became
convinced that this was the right way to use the money. He said of this
phone call, “I was convinced Warren’s was the best way to make a capital purchase program attractive to banks”.
For me, this version of history does not pass the smell test. I believe
that Paulson was well aware of the leverage that could be obtained by
investing in equity versus debt. He describes in the book how $70b of
equity could cover $700b in debt at a bank. Hank knew the value of
equity. I maintain that his plan was all along to acquire equity, but
he knew he could not sell that plan to Congress, so he masked his plans
with a debt buyback. That the TARP legislation was drafted to give him
the ability to buy equity was not a mistake of history, it was a part
of a plan that Paulson had considered from the very beginning.
After the decision had been made to change the use of Funds and the
money had been committed, Paulson continued to have Neel Kashkari
(visibly) chasing after a methodology to implement an asset purchase
program. This was done as a smoke screen to Congress to demonstrate
that the original intent of the legislation, to buy troubled assets,
was being pursued. No TARP money was ever used to buy the assets it was
intended for.
The James Lockhart, OFHEO/FHFA Connection
A significant part of the book is spent relaying the facts leading up
to the conservatorship of the GSEs, Fannie and Freddie. I think there
was a significant misrepresentation of the facts in the book. On page 6
Paulson says:
“I had spent much of August working with Lockhart. A friend of
the president’s since their prep school days. Jim understood the
gravity of the situation, but his people, who had said recently that
Fannie and Freddie were adequately capitalized, feared for their
reputations”.
This is not factually correct. It was not ‘some of Lockhart’s people’
who made the statement that F/F were adequately capitalized. It was
Lockhart himself. In the days that followed, both Paulson and the
president* repeated Lockhart’s words. Headlines and links on this:
Link: Here
Link: Here
The fact that the president*, the TSec. and the chief regulator of the
GSE’s all made misleading public statements regarding the health of the
GSEs just months before they were put into conservatorship is an
important part of this history. We now know, both from the book and
other information, that there was a very high level of concern
regarding the Agencies at exactly the time that these statements were
made. These were listed companies with a big stock float; misleading
information on their health was made public. Our highest officials
repeated that information.
This aspect of the story was not put in the proper perspective. The
implications of Lockhart’s words along with Paulson’s and the
president’s role were glossed over. It is my opinion that a mistake was
made with these statements. Paulson did not acknowledge that. This puts
a taint on the entire narrative. If I can’t trust this aspect of the
story, I have trouble believing in the rest of the information as well.
A Missing Link?
In numerous sections Paulson makes clear that as TSec he actually did
not have much power to commit money toward fixing problems. He had no
Bazooka and he wanted/needed one. To do anything, he had to have the
prior permission of Congress. TARP ultimately became his congressional
bazooka. Hank and his staff knew early on that they needed the ability
to act decisively and without the consent of Congress. They looked
endlessly for ways to fight the battles without having to go to the
Hill. They even used the 1934 Exchange Stabilization Fund to guaranty
the money market funds. This step was effective; it showed how
resourceful they were. It showed how far they were willing to push the
envelope.
One unused arrow in Treasury’s quiver was the Federal Financing Bank
("FFB"). This is a doghouse bank owned by Treasury. It finances
government agencies like HUD and the Post Office. It makes long-term
loans to rural electrics, it provides financing for foreign arms sales.
The FFB has made big loans to the FDIC in the past. It has a mandated
ceiling on its balance sheet of $500 billion. In 2008 it had assets of
only $50b, it had $450b of buying bower. So this bank had to have been
considered as a tool for Hank to use. He left no other stone unturned.
I, for one, can’t believe that he did not consider FFB when he was
looking for a bazooka and he didn’t want to ask congress for a new one.
There is no mention of the FFB in the book. I found that odd.
The following is not based on facts that I can deliver to you. Therefore treat it as such. **
I wrote a piece sometime ago on the FFB. Later on someone who claimed
to have the minutes of the FFB May 2008 Board minutes contacted me.
(The minutes are not public) I did not review this; portions of it were
read to me on the phone. There was one comment that struck me. I do not
recall the exact language. The essence was that in the minutes there
was a reference to a meeting that took place outside of the Board
Meeting and at that meeting there was some discussion of using FFB to
acquire significant quantities of mortgage related assets. No details
of that meeting were included in the minutes. As TSec. Hank Paulson was
the Chairman of the Board of the FFB, he had to be part of those
discussions. FFB was his “baby”.
My thinking on this has always been that the idea of using FFB to
acquire assets was a continuation of the ‘Break the Glass’ plan that
was developed by Treasury in February/March of 2008. This was the blue
print for TARP. The missing link to the break the glass plan was where
does the money come from? FFB was a possible candidate given that it
was controlled and run by Treasury and had the capacity to buy a lot of
assets. FFB was not designed to do this. My assumption was that it was
looked at and it was determined that there were legal (political?)
restrictions on FFB that would not allow it to be the bazooka that Hank
wanted. (Note: FFB did go on to buy $400mm of worthless Hope Now bonds.
So it was used as a popgun not a bazooka.)
There is another more speculative side to this. What mortgage assets
were being considered for purchase? The toxic ones or was there
consideration back in May of 2008 to acquire the MBS of Fannie Mae,
Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. We will never know. There is no discussion
of this in the book and the details of that meeting back in May of 08
will remain a mystery.
In the Author’s Note, Paulson says, “I have been blessed with a good memory”. I wonder why his memory is not so good on this aspect of the story.
Notes:
*On July 10, 2008 I was asked to draft a question re: the GSEs that
would be posed to President Bush by a FOX business reporter. I did
that, and the question was asked. Bush totally dodged my question and
responded, “Their (F/F’s) regulator (James Lockhart, his childhood
friend) has said, ‘they are adequately capitalized’”. End of interview.
I don't have a clip of this, but Roger Ailes at FOX does. Someday it
will be re-aired as part of this history.
**I write to government agencies all the time. I ask them questions.
They often say, ‘Buzz off”. Sometimes they say, “Here’s the info you
wanted.” It is rare that I do not get a response. I didn’t get any from
these:
12/3/2009 to FFB
Hello, I am a journalist. I write about financial matters.
Can you provide me with the Email link that has the minutes of May 2008 FFB board meeting?
12/14/2009 to FFB
Hello again. I am disappointed at the lack of response on my request. Possibly I should put some cards on the table.
I have reviewed the May 2008 board minutes. I took notes but do not
have a copy. I know that you have given this link to other journalists.
I learned of this from them. They contacted me to help with a story on
this. I know that there is a reference in the minutes to a secret
meeting. I know that the topic of this secret meeting was a discussion
as to the feasibility of the FFB acquiring Mortgage Bonds. This meeting
is an important part of that history. I would like to know more about
it. I believe my readers (2mm this year) would also like to know about
it.
Please reconsider my request. Thank you.
»
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Thiis where the statement...."talking one's book" becomes literally correct....
What is clear about Paulson is that he took the govt. position because it had a "non-govt. type paycheck"....over $200 million in savings....Why did the press not just come out and say Paulson was offered $200 million .....$200,000,000 to take the govt, position which also complimented Goldman Sachs....This was like a dream come true....
The rest is smoke and mirrors....
“If you look at recent history, there is a disturbance in the capital markets every four to eight years”.
Just in time for elections. Weird isn't it.
I think you will have to find more proofs outside of a CNBC article and a treasury website explanation. no offense, though thanks for the insight.
Thx Bruce.. great post (as always)
Gub
'My take' describes what they did:
Bernanke, Blankfein, Bush, Cheney, Clintons,
Dimon, Greenspan, Geithner, Obama, Paulson,
Romer, Rubin and Summers deserve to be in jail
for what they did to their free market fiduciaries
including America.
Buffett a dodering old fool whose naked puts
and tax intrigues may finish him and BRK off.
What has he ever produced? Their Politburo
actions far exceeded the dissembling duplicity
of Alexander Hamilton making his Bank of New
York friends rich as Treasury Secretary by
gathering and redeeming worthless Continentals
with silver specie. At least Aaron Burr gave him
his final desserts on earth.
The pity is Congress and Courts repeatedly
bailed on their oversight responsibilities by
appointing aqnd confirming tax dodgers to
oversee the House and IRS, most recently
a hundred thousand dollar IMF piker and the
other with a $480 M tax exempt sale of GS
stock.
At least Congress may be replaced by the
Populist Tea Party as the consequences of
treason in high places are fully comprehended
and cannot be covered up by government
monopoly media. Amazing the Criminal Politicians
have the gall to nervously and repeatedly go on
TV to call for regulating what they unregulated,
to assert that although they missed the
beginning of the Great Crash and did not
stabilize currency, deficits, debts or markets,
they know the worst is over (a claim they
made for two years), the world would have been
worse if they had not doubled the debt,
yet they did not have the authority to do their
jobs right. (If only we would make them Caesars.)
Time and history will expose them for what they
did to destroy the noblest experiment in
Constitutional government yet. No self-serving
books they write or flog can expunge that.
Living with themselves and what they did is
only the start of their purgatory, which will
continue until they and their like reform...
http://www.jubileeprosperity.com/
Great Job Bruce..your article needs to be published across the globe.I think anyone with an ounce of integrity can see the inner turmoil Paulson feels when retelling half of the facts.If you watched him on Charlie Rose you will notice how he couldn't bear to say the word Goldman Sachs regarding his compensation..and how he rescued them and directly himself.Frankly m .for me that was all I needed to hear ..Paulson stopping in mid sentence before he indighted his own self serving self.His obvuscation is telling.And you uncovered teh missing link.Bravo!
I do think he is not comfortable with his decisions and will deal with it in infamy as he counts his tax free millions having saved his own retirement.At the expense of teh tax payers who get the raw end of every deal in this nation ever seince teh S and L bailouts , the crummy Less Developed Country loans, LTC debaucle.Medieval as it is as if we are prisoners to artifice.Sadly, the day will come when all the chickens will come home to roost when China and Russia and Whomever else can laugh in our faces for being captive to hubris and impotence.
I know in his mind he want sto believe in his work as a grand Hail Mary.UNfortunately , his face tells the sober truth.We were had.
Does anyone find the timing of Paulson's tome and "book tour" in front of Congress and the softballs on MSM predate Cuomo's hammer on BAC by barely a week? hmmm....
Thanks Bruce
Paulson needs to be publicly impaled and then quartered.
He is that big of crook and enemy of the people of this country. HE has done that amount of capital damage to warrant such a capital punishment.
As soon as he cited verses on Charlie Rose this sprung to mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1OXAi7rNMg
That poor man really regretted getting caught.
Well done Bruce, thank you.
I always enjoy your writings Bruce and thank you sincerely for your continued efforts to uncover the truth. Excellent job on this article!
He didn't know what was coming?
FBI warning in 2004 of mortgage fraud.
Mike Gelband (Head of global fixed income at Lehman) in 2005, who also told Hank Paulson 1yr. before his nomination
Lawrence Lindsey (consultant to Lehman) former Bush chief economist. Warned Lehman in 2006.
Thanks for the book review, as I'm sure as hell not about to purchase either this or that other airhead, Sara P.'s book.
And any American who does should immediately be taken outside and shot.
At the risk of being confused with a certain solar-stock promoter, I'd like to offer my take on the Buffett and Lockhart points.
The factual discrepancy says something about Paulson's management style. He blamed "advisors," not Lockhart himself. I suspect he used this technique when at Goldman: backing up the subordinate boss by blaming bad [non-Goldman] advice that boss supposedly received...
...and then, in private, saying something of this sort to that same subordinate: "I covered you this time, but you'd better watch it the next time. Get better 'advice' next time, you get me?"
Regarding Buffett: he served as the enabling expert. Perhaps the 'eureka' moment was "Eureka! With Warren pushing this, I can do it. No-one around here thinks he has a hidden agenda."
I think what some of you gents aren't factoring in is that you are probably smarter than Paulson in ways he doesn't comprehend. To me he is the guy who can perform complex mathematical equations yet cant connect the dots, geniuses are like that, Einstein couldn't tie his shoes. Sure its logical to us that if A knew about B and b knew about C then A knew about C. I see it, you see it but look at Paulson's face when he speaks,the ball went over the fence and he doesn't know how to deal with it. I remember a friend in the movie biz who had worked with Orson Wells. He one day explained to me how he was well known in Hollywood as the biggest prick in the industry that couldn't get along with anyone on the set. What a dichotomy, the world loved him. Whats it all mean? I don't know but to me it means even a idiot savant can run the world's economy.
IMHO
Demand limits in campaign contributions and term limits.
Amen
the education of little tree
a real interesting book lol but all made out of whole cloth
grims fairy tales .. call a spade a spade the guy just destroyed the lives of millions .. his just disserts is a jail cell.. and less of this romancing the stone ..Poulson has been a king maker for years on the looting of the american public.
The whole Paulson charade doesn't make sense.
I watched him promoting his book on parts of 3 different shows. He repeatedly stressed two essentially contradictory points. First, big government is the last thing we need, blah, blah, blah--he was sickened by the bailouts as against his inner core. Then he does a 180 and insists that we just couldn't have avoided the financial meltdown any better than we did because no one could have seen it coming and once it arrived we (government) didn't have the "authorities" (laws) we needed to handle the emergency. Hence he alone should be empowered to "do what was necessary to save the system."
Then another 180: the laws he advocates (even now) wouldn't have affected the crisis. Are you spinning, yet?
Psychologically, Paulson doesn't see himself as big government because his main allegiance was/still is to Goldman-Sachs. I think Bruce has it dead right. Paulson is spinning. But he looks worst when he pretends letting Lehman fail (and the attendant unintended consequences) was sort of an unforeseen accident.
Paulson really started paying attention when it became obvious that if AIG went down, so would GS. And that is perhaps giving him credit he doesn't deserve. It seems more than a little stinky that GS is now the only game in town.
Or, to look at another way (the way Paulson apparently wants us to look at it) he was such a doofus as Treasury Secretary, he sat around eating bon bons until his old firm Goldman started to implode. Now that's the kind of crisis responsiveness we need in a government official, isn't it?
Why do I still think we're being lied to?
That paradox you mentioned has a lineage. William F. Buckley held that Big Government was wrong in the abstract but was needed to fight Communism.
You are too kind Bruce but you did a great job showing some of the discrepancies that illustrate how we the people have been deceived on a monumental scale.
In an alternate universe where a country like ours has a treasury secretary faced with the same scenario of fall 2008 would never get away with telling the country that we didn't have the tools to unwind Lehman--one day in front of congress ( instead of three weeks lobbying for 700b in TARP) could have given all the tools necessary but it wouldn't have given all the affiliates of GS MS and JPM the win on the "let's kill Lehman" bet-shorts, puts, CDS's...it would be obvious that a treasury secretary would understand that big win and if sincere about "saving" the financial system would have given Lehman the bank holding status and the 6billion loan they requested or let them go down and apply the same standards to GS, and MS when they asked for bank holding status, and no loan for AIG.
Also, in this alternate universe:
-AIG would have never been given an 85billion loan two days after denying Lehman a 6 billion dollar loan.
-this alternate universe treasury secretary would have never gotten away with telling the country that "socializing" the banks (GS, MS, CITI, MER) was the end of capitalism--instead the right kind of person would have admitted the failure to the depositors of the country by the gambling entities that these companies had become, and inform the country that it might take two or three years, but there would be no disruption in lending since the money would come straight from the government until these corrupt entites could be unwound.
-this alternate universe treasury secretary would have never gotten away with forcing BAC to pay two times what MER was worth by blackmailing the CEO--
--this alternate universe treasury secretary would assure the citizens that 40x leverage was basically criminal and that he would lobby to claw back all compensation based on anything over 20x for all years, PERIOD.....
-this alternate universe treasury secretary would realize that saving already defunk entities like GS, MS, MER and CITI on the basis that he was saving the world wasn't delusional, it was treason, and as such he wouldn't put the taxpayers on the hook for generations for enriching and supporting the criminal activities of the alternate universe privately held federal reserve and all their cartel members.
Paulson took big heat from everyone on the LEH mistake. He claims he did not have the ammo to help. That there was no collateral left for the Fed to make a loan on ala Bear. That no one wanted to buy it. That Fuld screwed up.
But he does accept that when it happened it spun everthing out of control and made the cost of the 'big fix' significantly larger.
oops, in this alternate universe, there would be an immediate audit of the privately held federal reserve, and the 25TRILLION in SPE's where backstops and guarantees are hidden would never happen since the administration is NONCORRUPT in this alternate universe and they were admitting to what went wrong and jailing the THOUSANDS of crooks involved with the crimes--and to help the economy during this difficult time, special dungeons would be built to house the evil animals that made the mess and perpetuated it--naturally it would have to include all the politicians that became captured and legislated to allow the criminality that gave rise to the multifaceted biggest crime of all ages.
Is he going to go on a victory tour for successfully saving the economy at a book signing in cratered detroit and have a book with a crankshaft book marker thrown at him?
Paulson = Traitor
Gave the keys to the US Treasury to Wall Street. Won't be happy until he and Benny are sharing a cell in prison.
Paulson = the Duke brother who got the machines turned back on…
Thanks Bruce, could never of thoroughly read and fact checked it myself, always good to have true check on their BS out there....
I started watching Hank and Charlie, but the body language and the fabricated story were more than I could stomach.
So I switched over to a Survivor Rerun. Better to watch Reality than a poorly written CYA script.
Hank was Goldman's inside guy to kill Lehman and Save Lloyd and Hank's own pension.
Rather than blaming the Russkies, perhaps little green men might not strain credulity quite so much.
So, the real question should not be what Hank et al did to "save the system", but rather what Hank, Alan, and Ben did, and are continuing to do to destroy this country.
Capital punishment ought to be accorded to those who had their hand in destroying the country while "purporting" to save the "system.
Any one have a bittorrent for this book? PDF audio or otherwise?
I bet he's a mason
He could be, but he's also a Christian Scientist.
"The TARP program was sold to the public and to Congress as a program to buy toxic assets that were “clogging” the system. Congress agreed to the $700b program on October 2, 2008."
To me the worst part of this whole bail-out is the fact that they spent almost twice this amount purchasing toxic RMBS without congressional approval.
If you remember TARP failed its first vote. The market declines another 700 points the next day and the weasels caved. The Fed then allocates twice the amount originally approved in TARP to do what they claimed TARP was originally intended to be used for.
Most of TARP has been paid back and is a new socialist slush fund, meanwhile we have twice the amount of originally approved toxic crap that we as taxpayers are liable for.
Someone can counter, I suppose, that it was well within the right of the FED charter to purchase this toxic junk. Why then did the Treasury go to congress in the first place demanding passage of TARP?
Two trillion later we are hearing about the successful repayment of $350 billion of TARP with interest which is about to be pissed away in non-existing zip codes.
TT
come on Bruce. what is there to read ? why waste your time and money on this piece of crap ? I least expected you to be analysing the dribble !! They make it sound like the crisis was some epic event that they solved with all the buckets BB has been pouring away !! The real crisis is just getting started .....
My God Bruce, how did you get through that book?? I watched Frankenstein on the Charlie Rose show and had to take a break now and then just to get my blood pressure back to a reasonable level. Charlie has become a great source for finding out what lies are being told to the sheeple. He keeps company with most of the Kleptocracy.
Please loan the book out whenever possible. Do what you can to keep that piece of crap from threatening the best sellers list.
I have not read the book. But it appears from this post that the thing that was on the brink was Junior's sanity.
The junk coward has returned.
Thanks Bruce for enduring what must have been a painful read. I barf at the thought of putting one red cent in Paulson's hands to read his self-serving lies, half-truths and revisionist history. Paulson under oath, stuttering his way through perjured testimony on the witness stand, as the culmination of some hard prosecutorial work from the New Untouchables, who first ferret out the truth from documents and the lower echelon employees, stooges (like Kashkari) and helpful whistleblowers before closing in, is an event I hope to see in the not-too-distant future.
Speaking of barfing, it happened to Hank regularly, once when he was on the Hill. The stress of this damn near killed him.
Brilliant analysis, Bruce. I encourage you to send this to WSJ Opinion.
I will, but they won't run it....
Perhaps not, but I bet that either the FT or Guardian (or maybe even the NYTimes) would.
Ha! Do you think they would print that? I think they are fans of Paulson's. Of course, a bit of controlled negativity might be part of the plan to close this uncomfortable chapter once and for all.
IMHO, you're right on with your take
I always bet on Hank as the leader, ben and tim are weak leaders period.
Hank knew what subprime would do, let's face facts, Lloyd was commodities bred and born, GS had a strangle hold on the bigger more liquid market, commodities. Hank knew what would happen when the pary ended.
Negotiating 101, ask for all. Thus his 3 page memo, he took whatever they gave and he didn't care, he knew what he would do before hand and the government paperworkers would never catch up. Speed was the strategy, get the money, get it too work, which he did. Support Ben in every cockamamie debt acronym.
IMHO, the question was really, how out of control did HFT get and a worlwide ray gun pointed at the biggest house, if they could burn it, they could own it.
That's my guess, Hank knew one thing more, and since he's a man of steel, he ain't saying shyte to no one.
Mr. Krasting, your articles, based on tenacious, calm and thorough fact-checking, are examples of what this country needs to replace the current raw sewage being sold as truth/news if we are to survive.
"tenacious, calm and thorough fact-checking"
Yes that needs to happen. But not in blogs or, even worse, books. BuIn courts of justice.
Is your country still running a demo-cracy? There is demo in the world. A republic ? There is re-publica in republic.
Sad to say that blogs won't replace a working judicial institution. In the US, the more the money, the less at risk of "justice".
"tenacious, calm and thorough fact-checking"
Yes that needs to happen. But not in blogs or, even worse, books. In courts of justice.
Is your country still running a demo-cracy? There is demo in the world. A republic ? There is re-publica in republic.
Sad to say that blogs won't replace a working judicial institution. In the US, the more the money, the less at risk of "justice".
"tenacious, calm and thorough fact-checking"
Yes that needs to happen. But not in blogs or, even worse, books. In courts of justice.
Is your country still running a demo-cracy? There is demo in the world. A republic ? There is re-publica in republic.
Sad to say that blogs won't replace a working judicial institution. In the US, the more the money, the less at risk of "justice".
My take?He is a liar.And possibly the most successful thief in history.