Henry Paulson



Henry "Hank" Merritt Paulson, Jr. (born 28 March 1946) is an American banker who served as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury during the final two years of George W. Bush's presidency. Prior to his role in the U.S. Treasury, he was the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Goldman Sachs. He 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 and China.

Choose country over party (2016)

 * Full text of "Choose country over party" (24 June 2016), The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.


 * With Donald Trump as the presumptive presidential nominee, we are witnessing a populist hijacking of one of the United States' great political parties... [R]ooted in ignorance, prejudice, fear and isolationism... This troubles me deeply as a Republican, but it troubles me even more as an American.
 * As quoted in CBS News (June 2016)


 * Enough is enough... It's time to put country before party and say it together: Never Trump.
 * As quoted in CBS News (June 2016)

==Quotes about Henry Paulson, Hank Paulson, who is a Republican, was a leader at Goldman Sachs. He was the CEO there from 1999 to 2006. While there he accumulated 4.5 million shares of Goldman stock, and in his last year he received a $45 million bonus. Under Paulson's leadership, Goldman engaged in the kinds of reckless schemes that led to the financial crisis just a few years later. After George W. Bush nominated Paulson to become treasury secretary in 2006, he had to sell his stocks to avoid a conflict of interest, netting about $600 million. As treasury secretary, Paulson repeatedly defended the deregulation of Wall Street, assuring Congress and the world that the markets were strong and the financial system stable. That is, until one day when he came before the Senate Democratic and Republican caucuses, handed us a three-page bill, and said that if we did not give him a $700 billion blank check within a few days, the entire financial system would collapse. The great defender of free market capitalism came to Congress for a bailout-and the largest welfare check in the history of the country. At the meeting of the Democratic Caucus, I suggested to Paulson that he ask his banker and billionaire friends who benefited from the excesses of Wall Street, rather than middle-class taxpayers, to pick up the tab. Needless to say, Paulson disagreed. Hank Paulson is now worth an estimated $700 million.
 * Bernie Sanders Our Revolution (2016)