Paulson revealed US govt policy to Goldman Sachs – report

According to Felix Salmon at Reuters, Henry Paulson (pictured), the former US Treasury Secretary who was at the helm when the financial crisis hit in the autumn of 2008, held a meeting with Goldman Sachs’s board in Moscow in which he revealed details of future government policy.

The revelation is contained in a new book, Too Big To Fail, written by New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, which describes the events leading to the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year.

Sorkin’s book alleges that Paulson met with Goldman Sachs in July 2008 when he was in Moscow to encourage Russian investment in the US. Goldman’s board was also in town at the time.

Speech preview
Sorkin claims that Paulson, who had worked at Goldman for 32 years, asked his chief of staff Jim Wilkinson to organise a social meeting between him and the Goldman board. This is despite Paulson signing an ethics agreement when appointed Treasury Secretary in 2006 that he would not contact Goldman Sachs for the length of his tenure.

Sorkin writes: ““Paulson regaled his old friends with stories about his time in Treasury and his prognostications about the economy. They questioned him about the possibility of another bank blowing up, like Lehman, and he talked about the need for the Government to have the power to wind down troubled firms, offering a preview of his upcoming speech.”

Ethics experts yesterday called on the US Congress to investigate Paulson’s actions.

Further revelations
Reuters’ Salmon has further revelations on the Paulson/Goldman relationship today, reporting that Sorkin’s book also outlines a situation where Paulson is trying to work out what to do with Lehman Brothers  and cites an exchange between Lehman CEO Dick Fuld and Lehman President Bart McDade which reveals that Paulson called McDade directly to suggest that the firm open its books up to its competitor Goldman Sachs.

Paulson was also demanding a thorough review of Lehman’s confidential numbers, courtesy of Goldman Sachs, the book says.

‘Great vampire squid’
Goldman Sachs, which until the onset of the financial crisis had been quietly churning out very respectable profits, has since become a byword for excessive greed in the banking sector, with much public outrage accompanying the amount of money paid out to its employees in salaries and bonuses, despite the firm having received government aid to get it through the financial crisis.

The US investment bank has been the subject of a series of deeply unflattering articles in Rolling Stone magazine, for example.

In one piece, the bank was excoriated as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. The piece added that “if America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain”.

Goldman Sachs received US$10bn in government aid, which it has since repaid.