Word: paulson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Commission (SEC) removed rules that capped leverage at 15 to 1 for investment-banking firms like Goldman Sachs. That allowed the firms to vastly expand their lending activities without raising a single new dollar of capital. One big backer of the rule change was reportedly former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was then Goldman's CEO. By that time, the regulatory separation between investment banks and traditional banks had long since been removed, so traditional banks such as Citigroup and Bank of America shifted more and more of their lending operations to their investment-banking divisions, and leverage took...
...President Obama has a right to be incensed. Paulson and the Congress could have said that no one employed on Wall St could be paid more than $100,000 for the work they did in 2008 no matter how remarkable the results. It would have, in effect, put the Treasury in a position where it was running banks at a granular level. In October ,however, the government was not nearly as close to running the banks...
...Paulson and Representative Frank could have put in a number of rules the day the TARP cleared Congress. Frank agreed to an oversight commission that would review how the money had been spent, after it was spent. By doing that he simply wasted the time of this commission. It became nothing more than witnesses to recent history...
...Paulson stayed away from the bonus issue for two reasons. The first is that fighting with the banks over which investment banker should be paid what amount would have taken too long. The second was that he did not want to appear to be the de facto CEO of all the companies which got TARP money. He decided that in this crisis the banking executives would have to use their own discretion in the use of the money. He chose to leave this decision to their boards and not the Treasury. And as it became clear that the government would...
...bonuses were paid. It made no sense that the most highly paid people on Wall Street continued to make extraordinary amounts of money with the bonus payments, when their companies had to bailed out by taxpayers. In an ideal world, they would not have been given those bonuses. But, Paulson was not willing to push that point. He did not have the time to make the effort...