SELLER: Henry Paulson
LOCATION: Washington, D.C.
PRICE: $3,250,000
SIZE: 2,260 square feet, 3 full and 2 half bathrooms
YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Yesterday Your Mama discussed a fairly ordinary but still expensive home in Hawaii where President Obama, his handsome family and a coterie of Secret Service Agents spent the December holidays. Today we hop on our broom and high tail it right back to Washington, D.C. where former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and Bailout Baron Henry “Hank”
Paulson recently took it in the real estate
kiester.
Yes, we know we have arrived unfashionably late to the fête about Mister Paulson’s recent real estate travails it having already been discussed on
Curbed,
Bloomberg,
Huffington Post, and etc. but we just can’t resist a good story.
Mister
Hank Paulson–a man whose name ought to be known to every tax paying American–spent a few years in the early 1970s working in Washington. First he hoofed it at The Pentagon and then as an assistant to naughty boy John
Ehrlichman, one of then President Richard Nixon’s right arms and a key player in the Watergate scandal that sent him to the
pokey for a year an a half on convictions of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury. In 1974 Mister
Paulson left government service and hired into the Chicago office of the frightfully powerful investment banking concern Goldman Sachs. He rose through the ranks, and in the late 1990s he’d clawed his way to the tipp0top spot as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) where he made mountains of
moolah.
In 2006 then President George W. Bush tapped Mister
Paulson to replace John Snow as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Mister Paulson agreed and walked back into the belly of the political beast. Some may say that a man with Mister
Paulson’s experience and connections in the international financial markets is precisely what made him an ideal candidate for the job. Others might hiss that Mister Paulson’s deep ties to Goldman Sachs was a little like letting a fox loose in the hen house. Not long after Mister Paulson took the Treasury Department reins Wall Street and sub-prime mortgage markets (and etc.) went into a major melt down. The world learned of complex financial instruments like Credit Default Swaps that help to hobble the banking industry and bring the entire U.S. economy to its knees.
Mister
Paulson, as the Treasury Secretary, was given the task to spearheaded the inevitable and controversial government bail out of Wall Street and the various banking and insurance conglomerates whose spread sheets were spontaneously bursting into flames. In the fall of 2008 with the economy in free fall Mister
Paulson and Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve
and arguably the real leader of the Free World, used (roughly) seven hundred billion tax payer bucks to buy up bad debt incurred by the labyrinthine shenanigans of private financial institutions. Some argue this was a good thing and some staunchly declare this was a great thing. Some were adamant that these banks and other big businesses like GM were too big to fail and other felt in the pit of their stomach it was little more than a cash grab engineered to funnel vast sums of public money into private hands. Whatever one thinks, the whole matter was 14 kinds of ugly, seven types of perplexing, 147 sorts of flabbergasting that left Your Mama’s insides all tore up from a steady diet almost entirely comprised of copious amounts of gin, tonic, lime wedges and nerve pills.
Mister
Paulson and his long-time wife Wendy have a net worth frequently and usually reported to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $700,000,000. Their astonishing wealth makes the house they recently sold in Washington, D.C. seem modest for a man of his means, particularly compared to the real estate excess they can quite easily afford
iffin they wanted.
Property records show that in August of 2010, just a month after being sworn in as Treasury Secretary, Mister and Missus
Paulson paid $4,300,000 for their former residence located in a leafy neighborhood not so far from the Washington National Cathedral and walking distance to the embassies of Belgium, Norway, Finland and Azerbaijan and Iraq.
Now that he’s left his post as Treasury Secretary Mister and Missus
Paulson no longer require a residence in the nation’s capital and, according to
Redfin, in April of 2010 they put the 2,260 square foot house on the market with an asking price of $4,600,000. In September the price plummeted to $4,150,000 and just a few days before Christmas the
Paulson pad was sold for $3,250,000.
Full Story