The Captain of the Street

The government response to the housing mess took two main forms. The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates repeatedly, hoping to make life easier for borrowers and lenders. And under Paulson's direction, the Treasury Department put together the Hope Now coalition, an industry-led group that would modify mortgages before foreclosure. But by the time such efforts got started, too many dominoes had fallen.

In March, when Bear Stearns, the perennially troubled teen of Wall Street, got in too deep, Paulson hammered out a deal for JPMorgan Chase to access credit from the Federal Reserve to buy the investment bank at a bargain-basement price of $2 per share (later revised upward to $10 a share), because he didn't want to make it seem as if public shareholders were being bailed out. Paulson knew the plan flew in the face of the free-market philosophy to which he, and all his colleagues on Wall Street, clung so fiercely. But this was a special case. When commercial banks failed, a tried-and-tested procedure kicked in: the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took charge and made insured depositors whole. But there was no existing protocol or regulatory framework to deal with the failure of an investment bank. And because of its massive levels of debt and significance in the markets for credit-default swaps—a sort of insurance policy against investment losses—Bear Stearns had the capacity to harm hundreds of financial institutions. "The Federal Reserve believed—and I supported them—that it was the right thing to come in and intervene," Paulson tells NEWSWEEK.

The downfall of Bear Stearns sent Paulson and his colleagues into crisis mode—a mode they have yet to exit. For Paulson and his team at the Treasury Department, the summer was a string of ruined weekends. In July, Congress gave him authority to come to the aid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "If you've got a bazooka, and people know you've got it, you may not have to take it out," Paulson said. (Translation: if the market knew the companies had a federal backstop, investors would be more likely to give them more time to work out their troubles.) Paulson was forced to use the bazooka sooner rather than later. By the end of August, the weakened financial state of the two giants was threatening both domestic mortgage markets and the value of hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of bonds they had issued that were owned by central banks around the world.On the morning of Sunday, Sept. 7, the government essentially nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, agreeing to backstop their debt and provide new capital.

Given the unique nature of this financial crisis, Paulson—who spent his entire private-sector career at Goldman—has been a better fit for this job than his predecessors in the Bush administration. Snow ran a railroad company, and Paul O'Neill headed the aluminum producer Alcoa. Paulson, as Bolten notes, has the credibility and the respect of the markets, as well as power and authority. As a result, he has operated with considerable autonomy. "President Bush has delegated a great deal to me, and it's an awesome responsibility," Paulson says. "He's very supportive." The two Harvard M.B.A.s have spoken at least once daily for the past several weeks, in addition to having regular meetings. One reason Treasury has emerged as the leader in this crisis, more than the Federal Reserve, is that the problems in the main aren't in the banks that are part of the Federal Reserve system. They are in the unregulated Wall Street investment banks, which are Paulson's turf.

The key skill of an investment banker is understanding the thinking, motivations and fears of the person on the other side of the table. And Paulson has had to put all his skills to the test. Over the second weekend in September, when Lehman Brothers came seeking the kind of help that the government had given Bear Stearns, Paulson was conflicted about what to do. He was reluctant to set a new precedent and encourage what's referred to in the world of economics as "moral hazard"—the notion that the existence of a backstop would encourage further reckless behavior. Paulson essentially told Lehman CEO Richard Fuld, whom he knew from his days on Wall Street, that the bank needed to find a buyer in the wake of new losses. But Fuld dithered. And although Lehman was in bad shape, unlike Bear Stearns it didn't threaten to bring down the whole system. "I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers," Paulson said at a press conference in Washington. His refusal essentially forced Lehman into a bankruptcy filing and spurred Merrill Lynch to seek a deal with Bank of America. At Lehman, workers set up photos of Fuld and Paulson and stuck pins through their eyes.

Asked at that press conference if the public should interpret the refusal to help Lehman as an end to assistance for the financial sector, Paulson was cagey. He said he had to worry first and foremost about the "stability and orderliness of our financial system." He went on to prove his flexibility less than 24 hours later, with AIG. The gigantic insurer, which is a component of the Dow Jones industrial average, had several healthy units in its core business. But its AIG Financial Products unit, which had sold large volumes of credit-default swaps on subprime mortgages, was deep underwater. Were it to fail, AIG would pose the same systemic risk to the financial system that Bear Stearns had. Paulson informed congressional leaders that the government was coming to AIG's rescue. Using the Fannie/Freddie rescue as a template, he hammered out an aggressive deal. He installed a new CEO and extended $85 billion in credit—at a high interest rate—in exchange for an 80 percent stake in the company.

But given the uncertainty about who might fail next, the markets continued to panic. Investors turned against the only healthy players left on Wall Street, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, pummeling their stocks and threatening to force them into mergers with other firms. Banks began to lose confidence in one another, cutting off the flow of capital. Concerns arose even about money-market accounts, long considered among the safest of investments. Paulson again took out the bazooka: he and Bernanke crafted their plan to create a taxpayer-backed entity that would acquire mortgage-backed bonds from banks, and requested $700 billion from Congress to do so. Treasury also temporarily extended insurance to money-market funds. By the end of last week the stock markets were soaring.