Free Advice to Treasury Secretary Nominee Henry Paulson

Henry Paulson wants to get Robert Rubin's job, not Paul O'Neill's job or John Snow's job. Here's how to do it.

Comments

[Jim Dandy]

Among all the many ingredients for success listed in the earlier post, there is one key missing element in this case that makes it inevitably an impossible mission: "an insatiably curious president".

[dryfly]

Ya if he wants Rubin's job he'll have to go 'wayback' and work for Clinton... that job don't exist anymore.

[Cranky Observer]

The only thing I can imagine is that Paulson has been directed by some of the so-called grown-up Republicans who are supposedly still out there somewhere to go in and administer some serious spankings to the Radicals and neocons behind closed doors. Cause unless he has some sort of outside backing no one, and I mean NO ONE, is going to interfere with whatever the heck it is that the Cheney-Rumsfeld plan is supposed to be accomplishing.

Cranky

[James Wimberley]

I query the adulation of Larry Summers. Is he quite as good as he thinks he is?
There's a nice vignette of Summers attending a top-level Harvard seminar on global justice, from a post by Jon Mandle at Crooked Timber (http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/17/notes-from-kennedy-school-conference/):
"Summers came across as very smart but very arrogant. On the one hand, it actually was heartening that a person who has exercised so much power worries about these kinds of issues. These were good questions and just the kinds of things that should trouble him. They are not easy to answer and it was good that he was encouraging others to reflect on them. On the other hand, many of the people in that room have thought long and hard about exactly these issues and some even have generated powerful insights into them. He obviously had no idea what any of them have said, and he came off as lecturing us that we should start thinking about these problems that he thought of."

[I think this teaches you much more about Mandle than about Summers]

[theCoach]

He worked for the Nixon administration in 1973, right?

May his new job in government bring the same successes for the administration that his last job.

[Barry]

From Brad's January, 2004 post: "Even though Larry Lindsey is not playing "honest broker," there still is a very powerful quadrumvirate for a rational economic policy at the start of the administration: Greenspan, O'Neill, Daniels, and Hubbard. "

Brad, this was not true, and you knew by then that it was not true. It became apparent to those with zero self-delusion when Greenspan testified in favor of Bush's budget cuts. It became apparent to the other 99.99% of us when Greenspan blithely testified later that entitlements would have to be cut, pretending that he had no clue as to how the massive Bush deficits had come about.

Just because Greenspan is a very good economist doesn't mean that he can be trusted, especially when he saw an opportunity to change the course of federal policy for a decade or two, at the price of lying. We saw that with the SC in 2000, when several justices voted against their lifelong principles.

[dsquared]

Two points:

1. In re Paulson, I am reminded of Warren Buffet's aphorism: "when a management team with a good reputation takes over a company with a bad reputation, it is usually the company's reputation that survives".

2. In re Jon Mandle; I don't agree that this episode "tells us more about Mandle than Summers" because nearly everybody who has met LS has an anecdote like this. Perhaps it is the case that Larry Summers is the only normal man alive and all the rest of us are arseholes, but frankly I'm willing to trust the wisdom of crowds on this one.

[gab]

And even if Paulson gets Rubin's job, he doesn't have enough time to do any good anyway. Makes you wonder why he took the job, don't it?

[Brad DeLong]

Re: "Makes you wonder why he took the job, don't it?"

Three current theories:

--Blankfein was about to push him out of Goldman Sachs, and this is a way of leaving gracefully.

--Bolten has promised Paulson that Paulson will make economic policy for the next 2.5 years, and Paulson believes Bolton can deliver.

--Bolten has begged for help, and convinced Paulson that he owes it to the country to try to bring reality back to the White House.

An interesting sidelight is that I have found nobody who knows Paulson who, two weeks ago, thought he was going to take the job:

--Perhaps this means Paulson is a much better negotiator than is humanly possible, if he can keep his cards that close to his vest.

--Perhaps this means Paulson is now a much weaker negotiator than is generally thought, if he accepts deals that everybody else thinks he should reject.