Hank Paulson and taxpayers' money

Gene Messick
OpEdNews
November 15, 2008

Our troubles with Hank started back when he was CEO at Goldman-$achs. Hank helped launch the masked bogus financial instruments called "derivatives" which are at the Heart of the Global Meltdown of Banks around our Planet. Next, at the invitation of GwB, Hank skipped over to the US Treasury, where his months of failures to act made things worse. When the World Economy had festered to the point of near collapse– a week before Congress was to go home to hit the Campaign Trail – Hank laid a 3-page Bailout Plan before them, and said, "take it or leave it." BTW, if you don’t take it – while you’re out of Washington — the World as you know it will collapse. There will be Rioting in the Streets of America, requiring us to declare Martial Law. Obediently, Congress swallowed Hank’s Bailout Pig, whole.

Now, barely a month later, Hank is telling us what he already knew from the beginning: that the $700,000,000,000 he got from Congress to Bailout distressed homeowner mortgages couldn’t be done soon enough to make any difference. That’s why, thus far, his Bailout Czar Neel Kaskari (also imported from Goldman-$achs) has NOT bought ONE SINGLE distressed mortgage.

Instead, Hank announced: I changed my mind. This money is only going to Bailout my buddies who are Bankers. After all, they have lost the most from all this. Sorry: no money for homeowners! But not to worry. Someday it will trickle-down, just like Ronnie Reagan and Uncle Miltie Friedman told us it would. We’re going to give the money to big banks to buy smaller banks, so they can become "too big to fail". What Hank really means is that he hopes they will become "to big to regulate".

But this was not his first manipulation of Wall $treet Banking as head of Treasury. There were others, all of which failed:

-Spring 07, he said private financial institutions could allocate scarce Resources better than government intervention.
-August 07: Hank explained that the US subprime mortgage Fallout was largely contained due to the strongest Global Economy in decades.
-July 08: Hank said ours was a safe, sound banking system, that Regulators were on top of it, and it was a very manageable situation.
-August 08: Hank said he had no plans to inject capital into mortgage lenders Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. A few weeks later, Fannie and Freedie collapsed.

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