Paulson’s Next Stop: Johns Hopkins Washington Post (1/16/09):

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said yesterday that he has decided to take a position at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies after he leaves the Treasury Department.

His exact title has yet to be worked out, said a spokeswoman for the school in downtown Washington.

In an interview on his last official workday at the department, Paulson said he decided on SAIS to have an office and “a place to hang my hat.” He said he plans to stay for at least several months before deciding what to do next.

Paulson said he has yet to make up his mind on a long-term career option but wants to be involved in nature conservation. A former chairman of Goldman Sachs, Paulson added that he is not interested in taking a job as a chief executive of a company, nor is he seeking to make money.

Since the Post is basically laundering a press release here, I figured I’d translate:

Johns Hopkins isn’t interested in competency, just adding another notch to the “former cabinet secretary” list they use to pitch students and donors.

Paulson, because he’s a bit slow, just realized that after shoveling government money to Wall Street and failing to secure terms favorable to the taxpayers in a very public ongoing debacle called TARP, he can’t exactly return to Lower Manhattan as an investment bank CEO or board member. It’s not that he doesn’t want such a job, he just doesn’t want the associated scrutiny.

Nature conservation would have to begin with remediating the damage done by his burning stacks of money in TARP, no easy task.

I wrote and held the bit above for the time when Paulson came out in public again. And that time is now:

A book this fall will offer one of the ultimate inside takes on the economic crisis, from former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson.

“I didn’t come to Washington thinking I was going to leave and write a book, but this period was so significant and there are so many insights and so many lessons learned that I think an understanding of this extraordinary period is important,” Paulson told the Associated Press Wednesday from his office at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

Insights and lessons learned. If this was actually the case, Paulson should be advising his bumbling successor. But what could Paulson have possibly learned? Everything he touched fell apart, and he couldn’t open his mouth without saying something that was proven false in almost no time at all. From his greatest hits:

“All the signs I look at show the housing market is at or near the bottom. The U.S. economy is very healthy and robust.” (4/20/07)

“I do believe that the worst is likely to be behind us.” (5/7/08)

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson moved swiftly Thursday to defend Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from critics who have called them insolvent. “Their regulator has made clear that they are adequately capitalized.”(7/10/08)

“I believe we can get to the point within months where we turn the corner on housing.” (7/22/08)

I believe the banking system has been stabilized. No one is asking themselves anymore, is there some major institution that might fail and that we would not be able to do anything about it. (11/13/08)

I challenge anyone to come up with five statements from any one person that top Paulson on the scale of wrongness. (Cheney, maybe, but he’s the devil incarnate.) But when Paulson was given a chance to come clean on these and other massively costly errors in a Fox Business interview, he blamed other people:

“We’re not proud of all the mistakes that were made by many different people, different parties, failures of our regulatory system, failures of market discipline that got us here.”

I wonder if this is the “insight” and the “lessons learned” that we can expect in the book. If so, Johns Hopkins must be so proud. They may want to rethink giving him a job, and maybe send him packing with a nail on which to hang his hat.