McDonald, who wrote A Colossal Failure of Common Sense about the collapse of Lehman Brothers, is in Beijing for the Chinese release of his book. He says Paulson's book, which hits bookshelves today, is an obvious attempt to salvage his legacy.
Here's the letter (from the New York Post):
Hello from Beijing!
My thoughts on Hank Paulson's new book; "Saving my Legacy"...er...sorry I mean "On the Brink."
I think he is writing the book out of insecurity to salvage his legacy. He's a very private man, so why write the book now? Especially after he just spent most of 2008 in 14 hour days of tense workouts, coming up with new innovation after new innovation to help save a financial system he helped destroy.
Make no mistake about it, Henry Merritt Paulson was the man that pulled the trigger that launched a bullet into the forehead of Lehman Brothers at Point Blank Range. It was the decision that obliterated the world's economy.
They, Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke were so over their heads they started playing god and F.. the system. They disgraced the SEC, the FDIC and Congress time after time because they thought they knew better. This is the most slipperiest [sic] slopes [sic] in the history of democratic capitalism because once you go down that road, you're putting more and more power and the justification of deceit in the hands of Government. Right out of the Kremlin's playbook.
It's the 21st century version of Iran Contra, just add 6 more zeros to the price tag. Our grandchildren will be paying the price.
The decisions they made, forcing Bank of America to buy Countrywide at double the price they should have paid, shooting Washington Mutual and creating a windfall for JP Morgan, saving Bear, AIG, Fannie, Freddie, putting Ken Lewis in a headlock and making Bank of America buy Merrill for $50 bln when they could have waited 7 days and had it for $20 billion, and letting Lehman go = schizophrenia.
When they let Lehman go it made the AIG bailout 7x more expensive, Merrill 2x, GM 3x, Chrysler 2x.
Not to mention letting Lehman go made AIG's liabilities to Goldman go up by 5x!
Only 9 pages of his new book devoted to his time at Goldman. Come on Hank!
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