By Jeff M. Wilson
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson along with Federal Reserve Board Chariman Ben Bernanke offered to solve all of the current Wall Street credit problems. Their solution, Congress remits to them a blank check payable for $700 Billion. That’s slightly less than $2,300 from every man, woman and child in the United States. To paraphrase a member of Congress, “it’s like a paying an arsonist to put out the fire.”
Maybe it’s time we fire the arsonists.
Secretary Paulson, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth with a Harvard M.B.A., is brilliant. Having started at Goldman Sachs in 1974, he rose through the ranks to become Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs from the firm’s initial public offering in 1999 until his swearing in as Treasury Secretary in July 2006. It is more than ironic that he has amassed much of his personal of fortune of $500 million by creating and selling the very “toxic waste” investments that he is proposing that we, the U.S. taxpayers buy.