How is Hank Paulson Like Bernie Madoff?

Well, Eric Falkenstein has the following take on Bernie Madoff:

Clearly, he understood phone calls are best. People who meticulously avoid email should not be trusted, because it is simply too calculating, as if they know they are regularly committing crimes. A phone conversation can always be disavowed, you just say you were talking about last weekend's bar mitzvah.

And Felix Salmon, who has one of the sharpest minds in finance, notes a parallel with Hank Paulson in his exchange with Representative Jackie Speier:

Jackie Speier (D-Calif): Do you use email?

Hank Paulson: Do I use email? No, I don’t use it, personally.

JS: You don’t use it personally, or professionally?

HP: Yeah, I just don’t. So I’ve never used it for any business communications. Just never use it.

JS: So while you were secretary of the Treasury you never used email?

HP: No.

JS: How did you communicate with people?

HP: Telephone.

This does not prove that he is a dishonest person, though being a former head of Goldman Sachs certainly implies it, and as someone born in 1946, I understand how this might be a generational thing, but as someone who worked in finance, the value, and risks, of having a clear and incontrovertible copy of his discussions had to be clear to him.

If I were a betting man, I'd go with the fact that he knew that he broke the law regularly, and wanted deniability.