The Hotter the Fire the Cooler He Gets

To profile Henry Paulson (again!) in the midst of the financial crisis NPR brings in heavy hitter, Yuki Noguchi (who according to her bio at the WaPo "is particularly interested in writing about how consumers interact with technology and Internet subcultures -- the weirder the better.")

Parents might want to send the kids out of the room for this one. Noguchi is probably going to give us the dirt on Goldman Sachs with it's long tentacles into more governments than United Fruit Co. Or, perhaps like Nomi Prins in the Nation she's going to remind us of "the fact that Paulson presided over Goldman Sachs during a period when the firm increasingly transformed itself from a classic investment bank relying heavily on profit from stable fees into something resembling a hedge fund, in which record profits were based on trading bets made with borrowed funds." Probably she'll consult economist Joseph Stiglitz who will tell her that "Paulson and others in Wall Street are claiming that the bailout is necessary and that we are in deep trouble. Not long ago, they were telling us that we had turned a corner." Or maybe...

...she'll just produce some vacuous, uninformative, weirder the better NPR homage to Paulson, using lines like

• "Garten, a professor at Yale, is no slouch, but he says, Paulson keeps him on his toes."
• "...he [James Gorder] says Paulson appears to have lost none of the endurance and vigor that made him stand out within an office full of overachievers."
• "Garten says Paulson's actually better under fire."
• "...so with the economy on the line, for Henry Paulson, the game is very much on."

It's journalism without mercy - and the direct quotes of "no slouch" Garten (a professor at Yale!) that she includes; they are hardcore:

• "one of the most intense people I have ever met....so alert it makes you feel lazy."
• "....and he came on like a raging bull, and I tell you I couldn't- I simply win a point"
  

and, of course,

• "The hotter the fire the cooler he gets."

A Free Market Wall Street Creature His Whole Life

That's how Robert Gross describes Henry Paulson for NPR on Tuesday's ATC. NPR seems to have scoured the landscape for someone with enough chutzpah to sing the praises of Czar Paulson. Voila, they found Gross of Newsweek who thinks Paulson is the "right man at the right time."

Here's Gross' Paulson (or maybe just gross Paulson):

• "...he spent 32 years on Wall Street working for Goldman Sachs - which is really the elite among the elite of investment banks. So he understands the capital markets, what's going on on Wall Street."
• "Paulson has the tools, the experience, the contacts, and the instincts to hammer out these kind of deals involving financial firms."
• "...worked in the Nixon whitehouse...Harvard MBA...investment banker..."
• "...very disciplined, hard working, hard charging...focused on execution, details, getting deals done."
• "...has a great amount of stamina."

Compare this homage to Salon Radio's interview with Richard Sheehan, who tells Glenn Greenwald,

"Paulson was among those that were creating the problem, rather than warning about the problem. In his role as CEO of Goldman Sachs, Goldman -- under his watch -- created a whole lot of CDOs [collateralized debt obligations] that now are under the heading of 'toxic waste.'"