THE LEHMAN BANKRUPTCY….Henry Paulson (and the Bush White House in general) handled the politics of the bailout bill poorly. But Ezra Klein says another factor is even more important:
Paulson’s political mismanagement doesn’t much surprise me. He’s not a politician….It was his economic mismanagement that requires closer scrutiny. 15 days ago, he was presented with a crucial choice: Do you let Lehmnn fall into bankruptcy and create a market panic? Or do you save it and risk insulating Wall Street from the consequences of its actions? Timothy Geitner, the head of the New York Federal Reserve, warned that you had to save Lehman; the market couldn’t endure that sort of uncertainty. Paulson disagreed. Lehman fell. It was the biggest bankruptcy in history. Within days, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan were swallowed by the chaos. It was arguably the costliest mistake in the crisis, and it was Hank Paulson’s fault.
That’s true. But the funny thing is that I don’t think this really played a role in the events of the past week. The Lehman bankruptcy may have been a consensus disaster — even defenders of the decision are only willing to argue that maybe it was a necessary test case — but nobody really seems to be blaming Paulson for this. Maybe behind the scenes they are, but in public it’s rarely even mentioned.
I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because a lot of people at the time seemed to agree that it was time to stop bailing out banks. Maybe it’s because everyone knows there was no political support for propping up Lehman. I don’t know. But I’d sure be interested in seeing a tick-tock of the events that led up to Paulson’s decision. I’ve seen a couple of good pieces about the aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy, but not much about the couple of days before it. Anybody know of one?
