Word: congression
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Paulson knows it. And that's why he's ready to play tough, like hinting that things are still dangerous and Congress, which has been informally debating add-on provisions like equity stakes in the Wall Street firms and new limits on executive compensation, doesn't have all the time in the world to act. "These markets are still very fragile and the conditions in the credit markets are very tight," he says. Asked whether ongoing negotiations on the Hill could spook markets, he says, "That obviously impacts the market and the markets are watching what's going...
Paulson faces other problems on Capitol Hill too. Both parties in Congress are by now deeply skeptical of any new Administration demands for increased executive authority and are vehemently pushing for more oversight of how Treasury will manage the bailout. The Paulson plan is bigger in that regard than just about anything Bush asked for in the war on terror. Section eight of the proposal he sent to Congress says, for example, "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court...
...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, ask for it and not get it. And so it wasn't until last week when the markets were literally coming unglued that we needed to take a number of other emergency short-term actions, that we knew that we had to do something to get at the heart of that problem which was the housing correction and the illiquid assets...
They'll have a big role, but I think the next administration, the next Congress-there's so much that needs to be done, so much work. We have a regulatory system 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 It's not that, it's just outdated, outmoded, ineffective, the architecture was put in place in a different era and it hasn't kept pace with the evolving financial markets...
...would just say, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so you'll get it from me - I look at that totally different than any of the rest of this. Those charters were set up a long time ago by Congress with the ambiguities and the obligations around that. This was living up to our responsibilities as the United States of America. There was $5.4 trillion of debt, mortgage-backed securities and debt here and around the world, $3.7 trillion...