Hank the Tank’s answer to America’s deficit: more prayer, less healthcare

The markets are jumpy, the dollar is tired, and Alan Greenspan has sunk below the horizon. Now more than ever the dollar needs a top-class spokesman, and in Hank the Tank it may have found one. Henry Paulson, boss of Goldman Sachs, lion of Wall Street, took some persuading to jump ship and serve as George Bush’s new Treasury secretary, but in the end the sentimental lure of seeing his name on dollar bills proved too much. After all, he owns 700 million of them himself. He seems to think that he will get a say in making economic policy, unlike his two ineffectual predecessors at Treasury, Paul O’Neill and John Snow, whose role was limited to talking policies up. Good luck to him, but the Bush administration has only two and a half years left, and its room for manoeuvre on fiscal policy is all but spent. Paulson, however brilliant his ideas, is not going to change George Bush’s fortunes in any big way, which accounts in part for the general warmth of his welcome.