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Hank Paulson To Write Goldman/Bush/Credit Default Swap Tell-All

Hank Paulson has a book deal. And if there is demand in the marketplace for yet another score-settling insider account by a flawed but well-meaning Bush appointee, we guess it is Hank. Since the centimillionaire is generously refusing an advance and donating the proceeds to a hotline that helps homeowners prevent foreclosure -- an endeavor he did not have much time for as Treasury Secretary -- we'll put a copy on hold. But a Hank Paulson book is veritably guaranteed to disappoint, right? Or should we hedge that statement?

After all, Paulson is a competitive guy, and the "Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Tell-All" genre has formidable competition in The Price Of Loyalty, Ron Suskind's account of Paul O'Neill's tenure in that post -- plus Paulson has the advantages of having presided over the spectacular financial crisis that begat the current depression and Goldman Sachs. Paulson doesn't seem to have pent-up literary ambitions -- instituting the short selling ban was his equivalent to "burning books," he told the Post -- but he will undoubtedly submit himself to the editorial judgments of his daughter, a journalist who writes about public education. And in interviews, as his willingness to admit to burning books suggests, Paulson has seemed less of an ideologue than an ambitious business man who had never given ideology much thought -- so we won't be getting Ten Minutes From Normal here. (Although it would be awesome if he ripped off that title.)

On the other hand...

This is Hank Paulson we are talking about. (Also, our sources in publishing tell us Paulson's editor at Grand Central Publishing, Rick Wolff, is generally a straitlaced, "safe" type, which is to say, unfortunately not the type to push Hank to structure the book entirely as a series of BlackBerry exchanges with John Paulson or draw parallels between his wrongheaded embrace of deregulation and his Christian Scientist beliefs or anything "edgy" like that.)



9 Comments

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LOL...Dead ringer!

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Ummm.... "but well-meaning"? Seriously?

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Paulson and Bernanke obviously failed in a big way to recognize the scale of the disaster, but I wonder if they could have done much much worse.

Paulson at least abandoned the free market radicalism ideology, unlike, say, the House Republicans. Or like Herbert Hoover who undertook austerity measures to cut spending, raise tariffs.

This time we just might avoid a second great depression because of admittedly flawed but persistent government intervention. Things could be far far worse.

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The aptly titled "How I didn't do jack shit to save the American economy and other assorted humor" by Goldman Sachs pony boy and inventor of the bailout cash trebuchet, Henry Paulson.

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If this idiot had anything to say, he should have said it when it mattered!

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I wonder if he'll write the book in a weekend, like he did with the original bailout plan/ransom note, which was apparently written on the back of a cocktail napkin.

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Paulson's book will sell only to those that watch CNBC.

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He will not write a 'tell all' because it would implicate him and his clueless management!

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