What Paulson Knew

Daniel Gross devotes his column to a review of Henry Paulson's memoir of the financial crisis. The review, as a review, is good and readable, and it makes me think that the memoir itself would be worth reading. Gross does chide Paulson for being unreflective and for failing to see the big picture. Paulson takes things as they come; he doesn't place them in a larger context, and he doesn't have a grand philosophy to bring to bear on them.

What Gross doesn't, perhaps, get is that a more reflective man, a man with an explicit philosophy about how the economy was supposed to work, might very well have been paralyzed in the face of the financial crisis. Paulson's very pedestrian, task-oriented approach enabled him to deal with one problem at a time.

Gross mentions that Paulson is a birder. Well, there are birders who worry about the ecosystem as a whole and how our winged friends fit into it. But there are also birders who get out to a location, binoculars, field guide and notebook in hand, and just look for the birds that are there. Paulson strikes me as one of the latter.

The book is On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System.