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...only three pages long. "Ben, Tim and I had talked for months about how there might be a need to do something like this, discussed the various plans," Paulson told TIME on Sept. 24. "The one thing we knew was that we couldn't or shouldn't go to Congress until we absolutely needed to, because the worst thing would be to go to Congress...
...massive, unprecedented intervention in the financial markets should be the final economic act of a Republican President was made all the more stunning by the sight of no less a free-marketeer than Vice President Dick Cheney being dispatched to the Hill to sell it to furious Republicans. But Congress is coming late to this crisis. Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner--whose conference calls can number more than half a dozen a day--have been quietly trying to keep the ship in the channel for months. Treasury Secretary Paulson, 62, was one of Wall Street's toughest dealmakers...
...primary mover last fall in getting banks and mortgage companies to ease up on homeowners who faced foreclosure, while Bernanke dropped billions into jittery credit markets with a surprise rate cut. Geithner engineered the rescue in March of the investment bank Bear Stearns. In the summer, Paulson horsed Congress into giving him broad authority to seize troubled lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--which he ended up having to use two months later. And when the three have run into interference from conservatives in the White House who didn't much care for their intervention in free markets--including...
...asking Congress for $700 billion overnight when lawmakers have been unable for years to find funds for all sorts of other national priorities provoked a bitter and bipartisan backlash. "Paulson confused venture-capital behavior with leading a free society," says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "I don't know why Bernanke thinks a problem largely created by the Fed and the Treasury is something that only the Fed and the Treasury are smart enough to fix." Others went further: "It's financial socialism," Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky told Paulson and Bernanke at a stormy Senate Banking Committee hearing...
...bailout is just the beginning. Even if it works, that still leaves the job of making sure it never happens again. Congress needs to remake the 1930s-era patchwork of various federal agencies that oversee banks and financial institutions. "There's so much that needs to be done, so much work," Paulson said. "Some people want to say there's too little regulation. It's not that. It's just outdated, outmoded, ineffective. The architecture was put in place in a different era, and it hasn't kept pace with the evolving financial markets...