Review: Hank Paulson's On The Brink

REVIEW
In his 453-page memoir On The Brink, Hank Paulson is the grey-haired scientist huddled in a bunker, desperately welding together giant robots to stop Godzilla from flattening the city above.

The former treasury secretary was at the heart of a crisis that had leading bankers running around with their hair on fire and it's this sense of panic that he's most keen to highlight in his book. He does this mostly by slapping a huge wad of phone records down on the table and sprinkling in a few quotes from the sort of movie ciphers that say things like "God help us all" in the right places.

After all, when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke drops the bomb that "it is a matter of days before there is a meltdown in the financial system", it's like stuffing fans of 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow with a vat full of popcorn.

According to his introduction, Paulson's doing most of this from memory. You could argue - just like anyone who grasps the wheel during a crisis - he's keen to set the context, and to remind readers that even professionals struggle to juggle when they're tumbling down a steep hill.

Family members question his decision to take the role. Dark rumblings of catastrophe murmur in his head during early meetings. And suddenly it strikes. An endless stream of banking bosses burst in with tales of imminent collapse. And that added personal spice is there - the dry heaving, the working weekends and the dark spell toying with a bottle of sleeping pills before flushing it.

While he admits that some of the actions made in the closing months of 2008 would have been "abhorrent at any other time"" he asserts that "as first responders to an unprecedented crisis that threatened the destruction of the modern financial system, we had little choice".

This has and will be debated by any number of commentators, but his plain-speaking style does allow readers to peek in on a few dramatic exchanges.

He reports with no little glee that presidential candidate Barack Obama "chuckled" as rival John McCain's "political gambit" to demand talks on the crisis failed, revealing that "he had little to say in the forum he himself had called".

He also tells of a discussion on September 14, when English chancellor Alistair Darling explained the FSA's refusal of the Barclays deal for Lehman by saying "he was not willing to have us unload our problem on the British taxpayer".

With the "last hope" gone, the camera cuts to Lehman's CEO Dick Fuld crying "This can't be happening. Hank, you have to figure something out" and Paulson crying "The British screwed us" into a crowd like a double-crossed general.

It's a memoir faithful to the TV West Wing-image of politics, where people dart from room to room talking quickly, trying to stop the world from crashing into the sea. Never apologising. And never, never looking back.

It is only in the final throes that he reflects on solutions, urging America to incentivise savings and revise the "hopelessly outmoded" regulatory system. His focus is on the fact that - due to the administration's "temporary" measures - "we had been on the brink, but we had not fallen".

While even now, figureheads talk long and loud of change, perhaps his most telling comment is that "unfortunately, it takes a crisis to get difficult and important things done".