Bush didn’t understand Paulson’s bailout

Those who think that the financial bailout in the US was rushed through without sufficient thought and that the Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson had far too much latitude will find plenty of ammunition in a tell-all book by a former Bush speechwriter, Matt Latimer. Latimer worked in the White House in the final two years of the Bush administration and the extract from his book in GQ gives a sense of the confusion as the administration tried to deal with the crisis. What is most revealing to me is how even the president didn’t know what the bailout was trying to do:

“the president was clearly confused about how the government would buy these securities. He repeated his belief that the government was going to “buy low and sell high,” and he still didn’t understand why we hadn’t put that into the speech like he’d asked us to. When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless.