“Hey Hank – Why’d we miss the Housing Crisis?”

You’ve undoubtedly seen former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson all over the tube in the past few days – out doing his part to peddle his new memoir On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System. His account is being received pretty positively, for the most part. I’m going to start it today, but I always love watching the big interviews that are given preceding a book launch.

Now, for our purposes here, Paulson has elaborated on the housing market and why it happened too fast to do anything about, and the potential risk of a “double dip.”

Paulson also touches on redefault rates, which were awful then and horrific now.

When he came to the swamp, he says that he knew that we were “due” for a credit crisis. What do you think? Couldn’t we – didn’t we see this happening?

P.S.: If you haven’t gotten your fix of Paulson, he is going to give a webcast from SAIS at Johns Hopkins University Feb. 16th at 5:30 P.M. (EST).