Seriously? How embarrassing is it that our treasury secretary is acting like a six year-old at a time of supposedly unparallelled crisis? I mean, I’ve got a six year-old around the house, and a lot of this looks very familiar. The posturing, the fake tears, the insincere flattery, the lies, the pretence. The making-shit-up approach to facts. That’s expected behavior from a 2nd grader, but it’s just a wee bit lame for a guy who’s in charge of the largest financial system in the world, no?
Look, here’s what Forbes Magazine writes about the magic $700bn number that’s been thrown about by Paulson and his spoiled buddies in the administration and the financial industry for the past few days:
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
‘It’s not based on any particular data point,’ a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. ‘We just wanted to choose a really large number.’
We just wanted to choose a really large number?!? You really have No. Fucking. Clue. about how to do your job, do you, Mr. Paulson? It’s Katrina all over again, when Bush hired some ex horse wanker to run FEMA and — surprise! — disaster management became an embarrassment not to mention a disaster in and of itself. So, basically, Paulson just pulled some really huge number out of his ass, slapped it on the table with the arrogance of a con man and declared that if he didn’t get that much in small unnumbered bills by Monday there’d be trouble. Nice.
