Quotes About Henry Paulson

Let's not forget, what TARP did allowed us to move overnight and put capital into hundreds of banks, and that money came back plus $32 billion.

The Fed has neither the clear statutory authority nor the mandate to anticipate and deal with risks across our entire financial system.

An AIG failure would have been devastating to the financial system and to the economy.

Illiquid asset purchases are all about capital and encouraging private capital to come in.

I want to remind you of one thing, which is, when I look around the world and look at the long-term economic fundamentals we have in this country, I think they compare favorably with what I see in any major developed country in the world.

What I've said repeatedly is, 'I think the auto industry is a very important industry.'

If AIG collapsed, it would have buckled our financial system and wrought economic havoc on the lives of millions of our citizens.

The idea of being Treasury secretary in the abstract appealed to me, but my initial inclination was that it wasn't right for me to take that step.

When I left the Treasury, there was a poll that showed - and I don't remember the numbers exactly right - something like 90% of the people were against TARP. It prevented a disaster, but you don't get credit for a disaster that people don't see.

As late as March 2008 Henry Paulson, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, declared: "Our financial institutions, banks and investment banks, are strong. Our capital markets are resilient. They're efficient. They're flexible."25 Shortly thereafter, the entire economy was in turmoil. The risk models influencing Paulson's belief did not anticipate the scale of the bubble, similar to the turkey not anticipating the concept of Thanksgiving.

As I talk with the Chinese on currency, I encourage them to move much more quickly with opening up their capital markets to competition, because I don't believe the world is going to give them as much time as they would like.

Our overriding goal in restructuring our financial architecture should be that taxpayers never again have to save a failing financial institution.