Biz journalist writing Paulson memoir

Heidi Moore of New York magazine reports that Michael Carroll, the former editor of Institutional Investor magazine, is “co-writing” the autobiography of former Goldman Sachs head and Treasury secretary Hank Paulson.

Moore writes, “Carroll — whose co-workers consistently describe him as hard as nails, highly intellectual, meticulous in his reporting, stubborn, dogged, and a perfectionist — also has a lot of experience with many of the ancient Goldman Sachs conspiracy theories, having made a splash in October 1994 with the first real story about the firm’s mysterious partnership process. The story, headlined ‘Inside Goldman’s College of Cardinals,’ acknowledged the Vatican-like ritual and silence that surrounded the firm’s decision-making and kicked off a wave of speculation about the firm’s growing power. It positioned Carroll to know a lot about the later conflict between Hank Paulson and rival Jon Corzine that preceded Corzine’s departure from the firm; and led to a host of coverage and ‘gets’ for the editor, such as a interview with former Goldman Sachs partner and Treasury secretary Robert Rubin. In the interview, Rubin recounts a conversation with Paulson:

‘I said to [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson, ‘Once you’ve done this, you’ll never read a book or an article about the administration in the same way. You see it through different eyes.”

“Carroll is known as a talented wordsmith, a writer with a literary bent and a penchant for the more vivid portrayals of Wall Street’s personalities when they had the kind of swagger and importance that’s often missing from today’s armies of besuited bankers filing into Wal-Mart megabanks. He is often skeptical and more than a little cutting in his metaphors; in December 2007, as the credit crisis was settling in, he compared Wall Street’s refusal to bend to reality to the hubris of Norma Desmond, the fictional star of Sunset Boulevard.”

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