Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary has been asleep at the wheel for the last two years at least when the Sub-prime Mortgage lending credit crunch first surfaced in finance news says Mr Mortgage.
Paulson seems to be another Bush-era ring and joins George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney with the trademark combination swagger and incompetence, [they are unconscious incomptents, i.e. incompetent but they don't have the intellectual capacity to know it.]
As a former chairman of Goldman Sachs you would think that Henry Paulson actually had a clue, but as US Treasury Secretary he does not know what he is doing as he goes from one blunder to the next "rescue" of Fannie Mae, have triggered unintended consequences around the world, resulting in the death-spiral of financial values.
But last Friday, Paulson outdid even these Rumsfeldian achievements, when he demanded $US700 billion ($843 billion) from Congress for a "comprehensive and fundamental" solution to the global financial crisis, without apparently having any idea of what he would actually do.
The good news is that Paulson's blunders no longer matter very much. There will still be a huge US government [US Taxpayer] bank bailout, which Mr Mortgage says will do little to avert a disastrous slump in the US and global economies.
The other good news is that this mess wil have little effect to Australian mortgages and bank mortgage lenders.
But because President Bush and Henry Paulson have lost any political initiative, this bailout will now be led by the Democratic leadership in Congress and will be structured around its priorities -- relief from mortgage foreclosures, restrictions on bankers' pay and big government shareholdings in US banks.
For President Bush it is a disaster, and he now looks certain to pick up the wooden spoon as
"Worst US President Ever". He was certainly the most dangerous ever and the most lawless ever.
Expect more stuff ups from these maverick cowboys before they are done.
