Hank Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs and Treasury Secretary for the Bush administration gives some interesting information about his experience during last years financial collapse here.

Henry Paulson, the former U.S. Treasury Department secretary, just said in a CNBC interview that in the midst of the Lehman Brothers collapse he had no idea what to do and was so afraid he excused himself from an emergency meeting on the matter and called his wife.

“I’m scared,” he said he told his wife on a cell phone, while appearing to the others in the meeting that he was making a business telephone call. “I didn’t know what to do.”
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More shocking, is Paulson’s contention that prior to the collapse, neither he nor other administration officials had any idea how housing debt was structured in various Wall Street creations. Paulson has said that he discovered all of this in the midst of the crisis. Prior to the collapse, his department had done a study of housing and concluded there was no problem. The study left out the esoteric financial structures that turned out to be a disaster.

Now, if we are to take Hank at his word, that he was unaware, when many others not connected to Wall Street could see the rampant fraud embedded in the housing market and the securitization industry, then he is grossly incompetent. Why should anyone believe anything he has to say about solutions.

On the other hand, if he did know what was going on, then he is lying now and was lying then. In which case, why should anyone believe anything he has to say about solutions. It’s just not logical. Hank Paulson also told Americans during the Lehman collapse that “the Banking system is safe and sound”. Hank Paulson is irrelevant and is not to be trusted.