" Either way you cut this, it's a lie. ": Hand Me A Knife

Yves Smith on Paulson. No mincing of words here. I'm giving her the last word. She insists on it, and usually deserves it:

"Paulson Now Admits Mendacity

As readers may have noticed, we have gotten exercised about how brazenly the Treasury has been in lavishing cash on favored interests. Felix Salmon took up the theme, admittedly with less choler:

There does indeed seem to have been a visible change in Treasury policy since the election. Until that point, it cared a little about optics. Now, it's giving monster bailouts to the likes of AIG and American Express; it's dragging its feet on homeowner relief; and in general Hank Paulson's Wall Street buddies seem to be getting much better access than anybody in Detroit. And no one's even trying very hard to defend these actions in public: they know they'll be out of a job in January anyway, so they're just doing what they want to do and what they feel is right, without caring much whether anybody else agrees with them

Ed Harrison provided an alert on another bit of Treasury dishonesty, although the admission was coded, so you'd have to be paying attention to catch it. From the text of Paulson's remarks today (boldface ours):

During the two weeks that Congress considered the legislation, market conditions worsened considerably. It was clear to me by the time the bill was signed on October 3rd that we needed to act quickly and forcefully, and that purchasing troubled assets—our initial focus—would take time to implement and would not be sufficient given the severity of the problem. In consultation with the Federal Reserve, I determined that the most timely, effective step to improve credit market conditions was to strengthen bank balance sheets quickly through direct purchases of equity in banks.

Either way you cut this, it's a lie. Either Paulson let his intentions be misrepresented via his silence, or he is now falsely claiming to have changed direction earlier than he did. Nouriel Roubini has claimed that Treasury was resisting the idea of of inserting language that would allow for capital injections into banks but that some members of Congress thought it was necessary, and put statements into the Congressional record via floor debates to allow for that interpretation. Roubini further contends that Paulson changed his mind only as a result of the adverse market reaction after the bill was signed.

But if Roubini is wrong and Paulson's statement is accurate, it is still completely in keeping with the conduct of an Administration that told the public that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The bill was drafted to be extraordinarily vague and sweeping, and yet did not clearly give Paulson the authority he now says he realized back then that he needed while it was still being renegotiated.

As I said in a post titled, "Paulson's Cosmetic, Cynical Financial Regulation 'Reform'":

Why is it that the media feels compelled to take pronouncements from government officials more or less at face value? By now, they ought to know that if someone from the Bush Administration is moving his lips, odds are it's a lie.

Nothing has changed, neither the dishonest of the Bush crowd nor the reluctance of the media to call them on it. "

The last word today on this.