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Who Do You Call in the Event of an Emergency?

By Joseph Lawler on 10.13.09 @ 9:30AM

If you're Hank Paulson and the emergency is the looming insolvency of the US financial system, you call candidate Barack Obama, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Robert Rubin.

Nomi Prins went through Paulson's phone records for the months of the financial crisis, and reports her findings in the Daily Beast. The most intriguing fact is the frighteningly small number of people Paulson talked to on the phone during the key moments of the crisis: Bush, Geithner, Bernanke, Obama, McCain, the big investment banks, and precious few others. And remember, Paulson does not use email, so other than face to face, his phone conversations were his only outside communication.

Is it any wonder that the financial industry crumbled, when such enormous power was concentrated in such a small and isolated group?

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R. Dittmar| 10.13.09 @ 11:43AM

On the other hand when you're conspiring to loot the American treasury so you can enrich your fellow Goldman-Sachs cronies by bankrupting the competition (Lehman Bros.) and funneling money to them through a busted insurance company (AIG), you don't want to leave a lot of signed documents or easily traceable e-mail communiqués. Paulson's preferred mode of communicating is more understandable in that light.

For that matter you don't want to grease the skids for prosecutors pursuing the legal implications of strong-arming CEO's into abandoning their duty to shareholders (forcing B of A to buy Countrywide) by leaving paper trails - dead tree or electronic.