KEY POINTS:
Henry "Hank the Hammer" Paulson - a tee-totaller, devout Christian and keen bird-watcher - enjoys walking and kayaking at weekends at home with Wendy, his wife of 39 years.
But he hasn't been at home much in weeks, or in his corner office in the Treasury building in
Washington. Instead he has been spending hours in the fortress-like skyscrapers of lower Manhattan hashing out details of the biggest financial rescue plan in US history.
When he accepted the job of US Treasury Secretary at the tail end of the flagging Bush administration, his biggest worry was that he would not be able to make a difference. Many of his contemporaries agreed.
Paulson, 62, swapped his post as CEO of the venerable Goldman Sachs investment firm for the helm of the US Treasury, to which he was the third secretary appointed by President George W. Bush during his two terms in office.
With just two years to make his mark and waning Republican support in Congress, not much was expected of him. How wrong they were.
In the past month he has intervened in the market in an attempt to thwart global financial Armageddon more times than any of his predecessors in American history.
Some of the measures he has taken go even further than the policies drawn up in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall St crash and the ensuing Great Depression.
But while he has boldly stepped in to save some - Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG - he has let others feel the pain. Just ask Lehman Brothers' 26,000 employees how they feel about Paulson's methods and you won't hear many kind words.
With his gravelly voice and hunched 1.88m frame, the avid environmentalist and former college football star spent much of the past week as the public face of the Government's US$700 billion ($1021 billion) economic rescue plan.
"I hate the fact that we have to do it. But it's better than the alternative," Paulson said last week, describing the bailout decision as being "overwhelmingly obvious".
He likes to define his approach as flexible, but some call it unpredictable. Either way, this case-by-case approach and rejection of dogma in favour of action is the hallmark of Paulson's tenure at the Treasury so far.
In August 2006, just before Paulson was appointed to his present position, he showed his true colours with a four-point economic plan.
As a former Wall St CEO and free-market thinker, Paulson was a sound choice for the Republican Bush Administration. But the President and the far right of his party have been stunned as the uber-capitalist they had handpicked started to look increasingly like a bit of a lefty.
First up he outlined a renewed energy policy to stop global warming.
Indeed, Paulson was the only member of President Bush's cabinet who dared acknowledge that human actions contribute to global warming and that America should take swift action to address it.
Then he prescribed new policy to fix global trade and investment policy.
In a series of recommendations that had Republicans fuming, he vowed to reform social security and health care for the poor and to address the growing income gap between rich and poor. To talk of an income gap when all others in the Administration were still slapping themselves on the back for maintaining economic growth at all costs was utter heresy in the Bush camp.
But Hank the Hammer was not used to softening his views for anyone, and besides, he barely had two years of the Administration left so he was hardly likely to achieve his lofty manifesto.
Of course, he never intended to achieve half of it. His was a deft political move designed to declare unity with the left to ensure that, should he ever need swift and decisive support from Democrat-dominated Congress, he would have a good chance of getting it.
And in March this year his bridge-building efforts came in very handy, as he was forced to act swiftly to save Bear Stearns from the brink and orchestrate a Government bailout and a quick sale to JP Morgan. The Democrat Congress hardly blinked. Paulson had a free rein.
Then in April, with the economy in free fall, Paulson announced a plan for complete reform of the nation's financial regulators.
In so doing he transformed the Federal Reserve from an interest-rate obsessed think-tank to a powerful regulator of regulators, with a hand heavy enough to take on Wall St.
But events overtook his plans for reform and all of a sudden, Paulson was in the middle of an economic nightmare. Just as quickly as he had saved Bear Stearns he nationalised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the twin US mortgage guarantee outfits.
He handled the AIG bailout in person, calling chief executive Robert Willumstad last Tuesday night to give him the boot - after a long weekend during which he in effect closed down Lehman Brothers and forced Merrill Lynch to merge with Bank of America.
Paulson spurred more corporate M&A activity in five days than he did in an entire career on Wall St.
But there is a growing chorus of detractors in the US who think this type of heavy-handed and inconsistent interventionism will, in the long term, worsen the global crisis.
"America is more communist than China right now," billionaire investor Jim Rogers fumes in next month's issue of Fortune magazine when asked about Paulson's methods, adding that his interventionism amounted to "welfare for the rich".
In a speech before Congress earlier this year, Paulson revealed a plan to help Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should they ever need it, and made a prediction: "If you have a bazooka in your pocket, and people know [it], you may never have to take it out."
Paulson started his career as a liaison between the Treasury and Commerce Departments in the Administration of President Richard Nixon. He later went on to earn a master's in business administration at Harvard University and in 1974 joined Goldman Sachs where he spent his entire 32-year private career.
He was key to building up Goldman Sachs' Asian investment business, but Paulson - whose impact on the Treasury has been compared in recent days to that of Alexander Hamilton, the first person to fill the post - is not one for small talk.
And for someone who amassed an enormous personal fortune in his private-sector career, cashing out his US$500 million stake in Goldman Sachs when he left for the Treasury, Paulson does not flaunt it.
The man hoping to revive the global economy opts for a digital training watch over a Rolex, Newsweek magazine noted. The populist choice for a time-piece may also reflect his brusque approach to deal-making.
"Paulson was seldom thought of as a pal, or particularly charismatic," author Charles Ellis wrote in a recent book about the rise of Goldman Sachs.
"He's a no-bullshit kind of guy," added Democratic lawmaker Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
HENRY PAULSON
US Treasury Secretary
Age: 62.
Born: Palm Beach, Florida.
Raised: In Illinois as devout Christian Scientist.
Education: A star athlete at Barrington High School, Paulson was a champion wrestler and standout football player, graduating in 1964. Like George Bush he has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Career: Staff assistant at the Pentagon from 1970 to 1972. He then worked for the Administration of President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1973. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1974, becoming chief executive before leaving to join the Bush Administration in 2006.
- OBSERVER, AP
