MAKING the rounds of e-mail inboxes is a parody featuring Mr Paulson as the author of a Nigerian e-mail scam. 'I am ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America,' his message begins. 'My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 700 billion dollars US.
As point man, he has been the rather shamefaced public face of the Bush administration's plan to bail out the financial system.
He has been slammed for the bailout's changing focus and ad-hoc execution. He first argued that the money was desperately and immediately needed to buy troubled assets from financial institutions, then, he said it would not.
Instead, the Treasury used most of the first round of bailout money to invest directly in banks and lenders. The result: a government that seemed to be lurching from one tactic to the next with no coherent overall plan.
6 THE QUIET REVOLUTIONARY
Ben Bernanke
Fed chairman
HIS reputation looks to have survived the crisis much better than Mr Paulson's.
At Princeton University, where Mr Bernanke taught economics for many years, he was known for his retiring manner and his statistics-laden research on the Great Depression.
But the growing financial crisis has forced him to intervene on Wall Street in ways never before imagined. He has slashed interest rates, established new lending programmes, extended hundreds of billions of dollars to troubled financial firms, bought debt issued by companies and even taken distressed mortgage assets onto the Fed's books.
The predictable scholar is now engaged in the boldest use of the Fed's authority since its inception in 1913.
7 UNLIKELY HERO
Gordon Brown
British Prime Minister
JUST weeks before the fall of Lehman Brothers, he was being compared by newspaper cartoonists to 'Mr Bean'. Trailing badly in opinion polls, the bulky, charisma-free British leader appeared to be on the way out.
Now, he has been so widely praised for his leadership on the global financial crisis that an American political cartoon shows workers carving his face into Mount Rushmore.
His pioneering rescue plan for British banks was copied by the US and other governments.
More recently back home, his hero status has come under fire with opposition leaders now blasting him for created the mess in the first place with policies that encouraged banks to take risks.
8 HUMAN FACE OF CRISIS
Karthik Rajaram
Unemployed financial adviser
ON OCT 4, in Los Angeles, Karthik Rajaram, 45, shot his wife, mother-in- law and three sons before turning the gun on himself.
In a suicide note, he wrote that he was broke, having incurred massive stock market losses in the financial meltdown.
In Akron, Ohio, 90-year-old Addie Polk shot herself as sheriff's deputies tried to evict her from her foreclosed home.
These are but two of many tragic stories worldwide in a terrible year that has seen millions lose their homes, their money and their jobs.
9 NOT THE THREE WISE MEN
Alan Mulally, Rick Wagoner
and Robert Nardelli
CEOs of America's car giants
LESSON learnt: When visiting Congress to beg for money, leave the private jets at home.
Ford's Mr Alan Mulally, General Motors' Mr Rick Wagoner and Chrysler's Mr Robert Nardelli were publicly castigated by lawmakers last month for flying to Washington in separate corporate jets to plead for a US$38 billion (S$55 billion) government bailout.
A month later, the Detroit Three made the same trip, this time in fuel- efficient cars. GM and Chrysler got US$17.4 billion in government-backed loans while Ford said it had enough cash for now.
10 PYRAMID KING
Bernard Madoff
Investment manager
FITTINGLY, a year that began with Jerome Kerviel ends with Madoff, 70. As the Irish Independent newspaper put it yesterday, the whole world now seems like one big Ponzi scheme.
Madoff, a former chairman of Nasdaq, confessed earlier this month that his investment company was just 'one big lie' and that he had defrauded investors for decades.
As much as US$50 billion (S$72 billion) may have evaporated in his giant Ponzi or pyramid scam, a swindle offering unusually high returns, with early investors paid off with money from later investors.
The architect of history's biggest fraud depended on so many others to perpetuate his crimes that his downfall can be seen as an indictment of our time.
Hedge funds and banks earned big fees just channelling their rich clients' money to Madoff's Ponzi scheme; regulators received formal complaints but took no action.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on December 29, 2008.
