John Paulson's Very Bad Year

摘要

"We clearly stumbled last year," Paulson says. "We became overconfident as to the direction of the economy and took a lot of risk." On this June afternoon, Paulson, 56, sits in his midtown Manhattan offices, surrounded by his dozen or so Alexander Calder watercolors, which serve as a kind of millionaires' wallpaper in primary colors. The space is not the high-tech cockpit one imagines for a financial wizard at the levers of the world's money flow. Rather than wall-to-wall monitors and global heat maps, it's all cream carpeting and beige walls and looks like it could belong to any boutique real estate firm or law office, albeit one with a compulsive neat freak at the helm. Relatively speaking, it's a soothing place to confront questions about the incredible power and wealth one can amass on Wall Street, even as the rest of the economy struggles; the controversial means sometimes used to achieve it; and how it's possible to lose so much money so quickly.