Would You Bet Against This Man?

It used to be funny to watch former Treasury Secretary Snow sit next to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan during congressional testimony. While the 'maestro' would wax eloquently to the delight of all those in attendance (except for Representative Ron Paul of Texas), the man from Treasury came off as buffoonish.

His big Andy Rooney eyebrows would gesticulate wildly and the words offered up would oftentimes suddenly veer back toward the administration's talking points whenever danger lurked (that is, danger of saying something buffoonish).

The new duo in charge of the nation's money, Hank Paulson at the Treasury and Ben Bernanke at the Fed, seem to be a much better balanced pair and the new Treasury Secretary is clearly more competent than the former.

Maybe too competent.

According to this story($) in the Wall Street Journal, after just a few months in charge he's gotten the Working Group on Financial Markets back on a regular meeting schedule again and he seems to have found all the levers and knobs in Washington to go along with the ones at Goldman Sachs in New York.

Since taking the reins in July, the Wall Street veteran has reinvigorated the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, which had languished. He also has backed a private-sector effort to recommend changes to laws and rules that critics say handicap U.S. financial markets. And he raised business hopes that the government will ease a controversial rule created by the Sarbanes-Oxley law in response to corporate scandals.

Mr. Paulson is chairman of the Working Group, which coordinates government policy on financial markets and includes the heads of the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Mr. Paulson has insisted that they meet about every six weeks. Before his arrival, the group met every few months and sometimes as infrequently as once a quarter.

"The issues that are natural for the President's Working Group to deal with are issues that he has thought a lot about while he was on Wall Street and to which he clearly has wanted to devote a lot of attention while he's here in Washington," said Randal Quarles, who recently stepped down as Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance.

The Working Group is a significant lever to influence policies outside the Treasury's bailiwick. The committee is "where he can have influence over the process and can shape the debate," said Rob Nichols, president of the Financial Services Forum, a group of chief executives from that industry that met with Mr. Paulson and President Bush last week. Mr. Nichols, a former Treasury spokesman, said Mr. Paulson talked about "what we can do to keep the U.S. economy competitive and keep the capital markets competitive."

Now, that word 'competitive' must be some sort of code for something.

What it really means is anyone's guess, but somehow, it must mean more than what Merriam-Webster indicates - along with the menacing picture above is this even scarier one at the Department of Treasury (careful, you've been warned).

There must be more going on in the Paulson-led Working Group for Financial Markets than under his bumbling predecessor- just look at this man's pictures.

Mr. Paulson is having the Working Group look at the systemic risk posed by hedge funds and derivatives, and the government's ability to respond to a financial crisis, officials said.

He has ordered his chief of staff, Jim Wilkinson, to oversee the creation of a Treasury command center to track markets world-wide and serve as an operations base in a crisis. The center would revive a market-monitoring room closed in a 2003 budget cut. Mr. Wilkinson has relevant experience: A former spokesman for the U.S. in Iraq, he was a White House aide during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Don't bet against this man.