Just a few weeks ago, when the bailout was being rammed through Congress, I pointed out that Hank Paulson has proven himself clueless. He was wrong when he denied that were facing an economic crisis, and he was wrong again when he predicted a complete meltdown of our financial system if Congress didn’t give him a blank check immediately. Since Hank is always wrong, I asked, why should we “just trust him” that buying up bad investments from Wall Street was the solution to the crisis?
So it should come as no surprise that now Hank has decided the taxpayers don’t need to buy up the toxic assets of Wall Street after all. Whoops. Instead, he’s just going to continue to give our money directly to the financial firms that made the bad investments.
And how do we know that this time Paulson finally has it right? His statement today is less than reassuring:
“And to adequately reform our system, we must make sure we fully understand the nature of the problem which will not be possible until we are confident it is behind us.”
Atta boy, Hank. Who cares if you fully understand the nature of the problem? That’s no reason not to keep throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at it.