Hank Paulson is not a Hero!

I agree.

Paulson has a big blank spot in his book, i.e. what exactly was he doing at GS between 2000 and 2006? He doesnt mention Goldman's huge Synthetic CDO business or its subprime mortgage businesses in those years.

However.

When the s*** hit the fan, Paulson was the Trez Sec. And he had no good choices to make. I just wonder what all of his haters would have done better than him? If you were appointed to Trez Sec in 2006, what would you have done differently?

Oh you would have impose regulations. Well, you are not the Fed, you are the Treasury. You are not the SEC either. And you are not Congress. What power do you actually have?

I watched the two together and it's clear to say that HBO, or rather the writers downplayed how much these guys were assh-les (oh except for the greedy bankers, by the end of the movie it was clear these guys would find a nice cozy spot in the 7th layer of hell). Now it's probably not the writers fault, I mean the movie takes place over a small period of time and it's hard to write a script where the audience cannot feel sympathy for anyone. It's only nature that there always has to be a good and bad side, but Bernanke, for example, was shown as this meek little guy who could only think about Main Street and how he was going to live through an event he so feared, the Great Depression, and he didn't want to do this to the United States, blah, blah, blah. He was as much a tool as everyone else. I forget his name but the guy from Greenlining even stated Bernanke didn't admit there was a problem until 2009! He was already living the problem in 2008, so why only admit it a year later? Hell a man in his position, and Paulson's, should be aware of any reports pertaining to the problems with Wall Street, like the FBI report made in 2004, Rajan's report from 2005, Roubini's from 2006, Allan Sloane's pieces and Bill Ackmen's report from 2007, Charles Moriss' book from 2008, and warnings from the IMF. Wow 4 years of warning and they knew nothing? Bollocks.

Hell even my mother, who knows nothing about anything used to come home from work and laugh about the ridiculousness of the real estate market. She would tell us this days idiots who bought homes. She worked at a title company and would see people who worked at McDonald's, kids with minimum wage jobs, people who put $0 down and she would say in 6 months time these people will be in foreclosure, there is no way they will be able to pay this mortgage. I mean it was absurd the kind of people who thought they could afford these homes. And if my mother could see how ridiculous it was to lend to these people surely the bankers cannot say they were blind to it either. They knew what they were doing and they should all be serving prison sentences.

Nothing affects politicians until it affects their votes (ie the suckers who are losing their jobs and homes who only hold power over them when it comes time to vote). Of course they didn't care until the sh-t hit the fan.

Anyway I probably should have watched the doco before the movie but either way seeing them together was good. The doco gives a lot more information on how we got here and what happened but I think the HBO film did pretty well putting the crisis into laymen's terms.






If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all

I've seen 'Too Big to Fail' and 'Inside Job' - both of which are compelling viewing, but for different reasons - and the idea that '...Fail' is a lie or fiction and 'Inside Job' is the "Truth" is naive to say the least.
'Too Big to Fail' is based on a very credible and exhaustive book by Andrew Ross Sorkin that tells the inside story of what Paulson et al had to contend with. It doesn't show Paulson to be a hero, merely a flawed human being who makes mistakes and is under huge pressure and tries to stop the American economy collapsing. He may have been a part of Goldman and led the way for elements of the crisis to happen but that isn't the point.
People have a right to be angry, indeed they should be furious. But it is very complex and everyone is to blame: the Government, the regulators, the ratings agencies, the investment bankers, brokers, dodgy lenders, regular mortgage buyers thinking they can afford a house that that they had no right to own, consumers piling on the debt to buy big TVs and sofas on interest-free credit and on and on.
'Inside Job' is an excellent documentary and mostly on the money and explains the collapse and apportions blame very well. I've seen a lot of criticism of '..Fail' as some kind of apologist lie and exhortations to worship at the gospel of truth that is 'Inside Job'. This just plays to people's prejudices. They want to believe we are ruled over by evil overlords of greed who want nothing more than us ordinary worms to be subservient to them and ignorant of their crimes. 'Inside Job' does this and '...Fail' doesn't.
People were very happy to believe in bubble and think we could all buy what we wanted regardless of whether we could actually afford it. It's all part of a gutless culture of blame where the individual can palm off responsibility and put it on to anybody else.
And not all banks are to blame by the way: JP Morgan is a good example of a credible investment bank.
'Too Big to Fail' is a credible film whether you like it or not. Yes it may give Paulson and his team an aura of the men, and women, who saved the world, but I think it actually shows they really didn't have a clue what to do and were scared and blundered through best they could.
Whether they contributed to the mess is a necessary and possibly sidelined debate. It is all quite complicated.
'Inside Job' is good, but don't buy into this left-wing *beep* that it's the "truth". Truth is subjective and there are many different forms of it, especially in this crisis. A simple answer of regulation won't do.
'Inside Job' is an excellent starting point for understanding the crisis, how it started, what CDOs and credit default swaps are etc, but it shouldn't be an end point.
There are lots of fascinating and necessary books out there that should be read if you truly want to understand the financial collapse and don't merely want to take your already-formed prejudice about the Government being evil and bankers being evil etc. Gillian Tett's 'Fool's Gold', Michael Lewis's 'The Big Short', John Lanchester's 'Whoops...' and Andrew Ross Sorkin's 'Too Big To Fail'. These are just the tip of the iceberg.

Haven't seen this film yet but they actually paint Paulson as a hero?

Wow.

That's almost like saying the arsonist that helped set your house ablaze is a hero because he called the fire department before everything turned to ashes.

Unfortunately the economic fire we experienced was never put out. Nor could be with temporary stimulus measures. All they did was set 10 more houses on fire so the initial fire didn't seem so intense. The fundamental problem still remains and has fundamentally grown even larger.