October 14, 2009 archive

[New! Improved! Now with actual links to the full article (duh-oh!) ]

So I was reading this article, got pretty upset, and figured y’all should know about it.

Published on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 by The Daily Beast

Paulson’s Revealing Phone Records

While the economy was crashing last year, exclusively analyzed telephone records reveal the ex-Treasury secretary was talking far more to Obama and Geithner than Bush and McCain.

by Nomi Prins

Timothy Geithner’s just-released phone records caused quite a stir last week-specifically, the absurdly small Wall Street circle Obama’s Treasury secretary has consulted during one of the most critical economic periods in U.S. history. Yet as Winston Churchill once said, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” Understanding the situation we’re now facing requires an examination of how things went down among him, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and the most influential financial titans on the planet, during the bailout and bank landscape carve-out period.

So, I spent a fair portion of the weekend digging through 415 pages of Paulson’s calendar-which has received almost no scrutiny compared with the Geithner logs-during the seven most critical financial crisis months (March, 2008 and August 2008 through January 2009). August through October 2008 were particularly packed, encompassing 237 pages worth of calls. Categorizing these records by incoming and outgoing, individual and conference, calls per day and month, during that crucial period, I also crosschecked them against Geithner’s calendar.

The information doesn’t come in ready-made easy-to-digest classifications, but combing the logs reveals four interesting facts:…[giant snip]

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