and this little piggy hollowed out our nation…
This is *not* Hank Paulson's Piggy bank...
I came across this Bloomberg story on the state of Hank Paulson’s piggy bank. As a dutiful steward of our Nation’s interests, he was forced to place his fortune into a blind trust upon accepting his current position as Treasury Secretary. Now he gets to find out what happened to his money. Always a charmer, he jokes about it:
“I’ve got to find out where my money has been invested,” Paulson, 62, said today after a speech, drawing laughter from the Washington Economic Club.
“You know the old joke about how you make a small fortune? And that is, give a large fortune to a person in a blind trust,” he said today. “I haven’t even thought about how I’m going to be investing my money.”
Ah what fun. Of course, given the impact of his visionary stewardship on most Americans’ portfolios, it’s easy to imagine that many will have forgotten that he likely only accepted his position of unfailing public service for the >$100M tax loophole it afforded him.
Before taking the Treasury job, Paulson sold his Goldman Sachs shares and wasn’t required to pay capital gains taxes, according to a June 2006 divestiture notice about a stake that was valued at the time at about $485 million.
In this day and age, no self-respecting citizen so much as blinks at a mere ~$170M looting of the nation’s coffers. But it does raise the question: which is more ironically piquant? Our ring-side seats for the hollowing out of the American Republic or our knowledge that we paid through the nose for the privilege?
