Financial Crisis and Henry Paulson

It turned out that Paulson did want to and try to save Lehman. He also spent a great deal of effort to coordinate the interests of all parties, but at the last moment he was tricked by the British in the debt crisis, which eventually developed into a formal financial tsunami sweeping the globe.

Paulson recalled that on September 13, 2008, Lehman executives have already reached an agreement with the British Barclays Bank that the latter would acquire Lehman. Into the early morning of September 14, the situation is a drastic downturn. Paulson was told that the British Financial Supervisory Authority rejected the takeover plan. Paulson writes that in his phone conversation with the British finance minister, he that he was shocked the British Financial Supervisory Authority rejected the deal. Without any regret, the British finance minister made it clear that acquisition of Lehman was not possible. Paulson said they were tricked by the Englishman. In front of the facts he felt a sudden fear. Lehman is dead. AIG's problems are out of control. The United States will fall into a deeper recession.

Paulson did not know if this is for themselves and for the United States, words of self-defense, or to restore the more realistic scene of history. In any case, Paulson's memoirs have at least two layers of hidden meaning. First, the Lehman collapse led to a major collapse of the global financial system; second, the reasons for the closure of Lehman is not that the U.S. government does not want to save, or do not want to save them because of personal grudges, but because some foreign people were acting in bad faith, while others adding insult to injury.

Before the exposure the rumor was that Paulson agreed to help Goldman Sachs and other organizations by providing relief because Paulson had deep personal relations with the CEO's of these organizations, while Lehman's CEO Richard Fuld's wickedness was known by everyone. Paulson said that in order to save Lehman, he talked at least 50 times with Lehman CEO on the phone, and his early efforts to persuade other financial enterprises CEO, such as Bank of America CEO Lewis to lend a helping hand. However, he wrote, they are shrewd businessmen who will not rescue his own enemy. And to Paulson, the British are more hateful. Not only were they lying, they did so without any regret or apologies.

However, these do not allow Paulson to remove his disrepute as "chief culprit" in the financial crisis. The outbreak of the financial crisis is not simply caused by Americans being tricked by the British. In April 2007, Paulson in a speech in full swing at that time the market gave even bigger assurance: sub-prime mortgage problem had been largely brought under control. The financial crisis was to the full-blown from the horizon after more than a year's time. During this period, reasons such as the negligence of the officials like Paulson, together with Wall Street greed and short-term behavior, were causing the financial crisis intensified and spread to the root of the world, rather than Americans simply being tricked by the British.

Interestingly, Paulson also gives a rather frank assessment of several political figures. He said that during the crisis the then vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin conducted a telephone conversation with him and that she was not a good impression. As for the current president, Obama, Paulson was depressed to say that Obama campaign impressed him, but after the election, Obama and others suddenly were no longer able to speak for themselves.