After telling listeners at the beginning of a piece on changing medical malpractice laws that Democrats get money from lawyers, NPR did a piece on Henry Paulson's efforts to deal with the financial crisis and never once mentioned that he personally made hundreds of millions of dollars off the practices that helped to to fuel the housing bubble. While Paulson is described as a hard-working straight shooter who lives in a modest home, the piece does not tell listeners that Paulson earned hundreds of millions of dollars as head of Goldman Sachs. Goldman was one of the investment banks that packaged mortgaged back securities and sold them around the world. Paulson personally lobbied the Securities and Exchange Commission to huge increase the leverage limits that applied to investment banks like Goldman Sachs. This increased their profits, but made them hugely more vulnerable to a downturn. As a result of this move, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers both collapsed, Merrill Lynch had to be saved by Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the other two major investment banks, had to beg to change their status to bank holding companies on an emergency basis so that they could enjoy the protection of the Fed and the FDIC. Paulson's personal profit and involvement in the actions that caused the crisis is an important piece of information that should have been mentioned in this piece.
--Dean Baker
