Henry Paulson
Henry Paulson
Henry "Hank" Merritt Paulson, Jr.is an American banker who served as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury. He had served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs, and is now a fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies and the chairman of the Paulson Institute at the University of Chicago, which he founded in 2011 to promote sustainable economic growth and a cleaner environment around the world, with an initial focus on the United States...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth28 March 1946
CityPalm Beach, FL
CountryUnited States of America
We've had crooks from the beginning of time... it's always very interesting and troubling why good people do bad things.
From the beginning of time, we've had financial crises. People always blame the banks and for good reason. When you look for the root causes, they're almost always failed government policies.
When our markets work, people throughout our economy benefit - Americans seeking to buy a car or buy a home, families borrowing to pay for college, innovators borrowing on the strength of a good idea for a new product or technology, and businesses financing investments that create new jobs.
I always told people in the private sector, 'You can be the smartest person in the world, you can have the very best ideas, but if you can't sell them and you can't get other people to work with you, you're not going to succeed.'
If you've got a bazooka, and people know you've got it, you may not have to take it out.
Well, as you know, we're working through a difficult period in our financial markets right now as we work off some of the past excesses. But the American people can remain confident in the soundness and the resilience of our financial system.
Even if you don't have the authorities - and frankly I didn't have the authorities for anything - if you take charge, people will follow
I'm a straightforward person. I like to be direct with people.
We are very confident about the long-term outlook for our business, but believe that the immediate impact will be a further weakening in the operating environment and a delay in the economic recovery, ... However, given increased fiscal and monetary stimulus, we anticipate that long-term economic recovery should be more certain and vigorous than previously expected.
During the third quarter, we saw increasing activity levels across all of our major businesses and believe overall market conditions support a generally optimistic outlook.
I've never been antiregulation. I've always believed that raw, unregulated capitalism doesn't work.
A state-based regulatory system is quite burdensome. It allows price controls to create market distortions. It can hinder development of national products and can directly impact the competitiveness of U.S. insurers.
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.
We don't have a lot more time to deal with climate change, ... We need the right balance between regulation and market-based approaches.