Matt Taibbi On Henry Paulson

Oh boy, Matt Taibbi makes me feel goooood:

Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you’d have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a “national hero” — in the middle of a sweeping financial crisis, one in which half the world is in a panic and the unemployment rate just hit a 25-year high? Behavior like this, you usually don’t see it outside prison trusties who spend their evenings shining the guards’ boots. I can’t even think of a political press secretary who would sink that low. Hank Paulson, a hero? Are you fucking kidding us?

… Or maybe it was Paulson’s foresight in heading off the crisis before it happened that inspired you? Maybe it was the way Paulson pronounced the subprime fallout “contained” in 2007 and called the economy the “strongest in decades?” Or maybe it was the way he remained calm last July, saying that it was a “very manageable situation” and “our regulators are on top of it?” Remember how he said all that shit, Evan, just about six weeks before the world exploded? Remember that Henry Paulson was actually in charge of regulating the financial environment during the last years of the crisis and did nothing as his buddies on Wall Street built one gigantic mountain of leverage after another, gashing underwriting standards across the board, saddling the country with a generation of toxic assets that all of the rest of us will be paying for in taxes (instead of, for instance, a health care program, which we can now no longer afford) for the next fifty fucking years? Do you remember that part?

Or was it his non-intervention last summer when gas prices hit $4.50 a gallon thanks again to his old buddies at Goldman and Morgan Stanley, who juiced the commodities market with so much speculative cash that oil prices soared despite the fact that supply was up and demand was down all year? Do you remember that part? How about the way food prices soared thanks to the same commodities speculators? According to the World Food Program at the UN, about 100 million people joined the ranks of the hungry last year during the commodities spike.

Read the whole thing though. Hank Paulson scumbaggy-ness is not competely captured by the above.

See Also: Taibbi v Goldman Redux, We’re in Deep State, It’s Goldman Sachs’ Party And They’ll Profit If They Want To, and Taibbi vs. Goldman.