Treasury's Paulson is 'The Hammer' behind the bailout
— -- Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is accustomed to making big changes in a hurry.
When he was named chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs in 1994, he had to relocate to Manhattan from Chicago, where the salesman and executive known as "The Hammer" had risen rapidly through the ranks producing new clients for the investment bank.
Within days, his wife, Wendy, had looked at dozens of apartments and narrowed the list to two. Paulson, cellphone pressed to his ear, spent about five minutes apiece striding through the units, signaled his preference, then immediately winged off on an international business trip.
Tuesday, Paulson is spearheading an unprecedented global change as the Bush administration point man for the proposed $700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial industry as the economy reels from the credit crisis sparked by the national real estate slump and spiraling mortgage failure rates. He's scheduled to testify about the plan at a Senate Banking Committee hearing Tuesday.
The plan, crafted with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, an academic, softer-spoken Sundance Kid to Paulson's dealmaking Butch Cassidy, has brought him rock-star-like praise, along with mounting questions for the virtually unchecked power over the bailout fund penciled in for the Treasury secretary and his successors.
To hear those who know him tell it, there's no one more suited for the job.
"He's very tenacious," says Peter Fahey, a friend and retired Goldman Sachs partner who has known Paulson from their undergrad days at Dartmouth.
Fahey, noting that Paulson won All-East football honors as an offensive tackle despite an estimated 195-pound frame considered small for the position, cites one key to his friend's success on the gridiron and in professional life: "He does not take no for an answer."
The nation hasn't faced such high financial stakes since the Great Depression after the 1929 stock market crash.
In recent weeks, Lehman Bros. collapsed in bankruptcy. The government bailed out Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and insurance giant AIG. Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch were forced into abrupt sales. And credit markets remained all but paralyzed until last week's announcement of the bailout plan seemed to at least temporarily calm the chaos.
