Paulson and Goldman Met In Secret in Moscow
When Paulson learned that Goldman’s board would be in Moscow at the same time as him, he had [Treasury chief of staff] Jim Wilkinson organize a meeting with them. Nothing formal, purely social — for old times’ sake.
For fuck’s sake! Wilkinson thought. He and Treasury had had enough trouble trying to fend off all the Goldman Sachs conspiracy theories constantly being bandied about in Washington and on Wall Street. A private meeting with its board? In Moscow?
For the nearly two years that Paulson had been Treasury secretary he had not met privately with the board of any company, except for briefly dropping by a cocktail party that Larry Fink’s BlackRock was holding for its directors at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi in June.
via Felix Salmon » Blog Archive » The secret Paulson-Goldman meeting | Blogs |.
This is rocketing around the web and it’s awesome and horrible at the same time and, of course, nothing will be done about it.
It goes without saying that when the Treasury Secretary meets privately with the board of a company like Goldman there are all sorts of improprieties to consider, but this is really nothing new — after all it’s already been reported that Paulson was in touch with Goldman quite a lot during he crucial periods of 2008.
Have some more on Goldman coming out soon, apologize for the long absence, have been on some other stuff. Among other things dealing with a lot of disgruntled Cleveland Browns fans who are pissed that I compared Eric Mangini to Augustus Gloop, the pudgy kid who was drinking from the chocolate river without permission in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I thought Browns fans would find this funny, but apparently not. I got one letter from someone who expressed the feeling that if I were ever to have kids, he hoped “they would be born with Achondroplasia.” So I’m sitting there scratching my head, wondering what Achondroplasia is, and right on cue, two minutes later, he sends me a link to an X-ray picture of someone with the disease. I have to admit, I burst out laughing when I saw the picture — not because the disease is funny (it isn’t, not at all), but just because someone was feeling so crappy about their football team that they felt compelled to dig that horrifying thing up to send to some writer bashing their team. I mean, I totally understand the guy.
PS I know get word that Achodroplasia is just another word for dwarfism, which makes me feel like a total douche-bag for having depicted it as something horrible. I apologize to everyone for this idiotic mistake. As to the guy who sent this thing to me… let me just say that I’m continually surprised by the weirdness of the people out there on the internet.
Anyway, more on the real world later.