His investors, which included pension funds, endowments, wealthy families and individuals, were huge beneficiaries of his strategy, Mr. Paulson added.
The burden of unemployment, debt and homelessness will put many families and individuals under huge stress and prompt them to seek help.
"The argument in favor of allowing people to do this is based on our American tradition of giving individuals a huge amount of autonomy over their own bodies," said Dr. Eric Juengst, an ethicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Bank of America, Nokia, Intel and Pfizer are also streamlining their agencies.Chris Clark, head of brand strategy at HSBC, says his bank needed a group with a broad reach to cater to customers all over the world, who range from individuals to huge corporations.
For years, sophisticated investors and big financial institutions, all run by very well-paid individuals, invested huge sums of money on the basis of a few pearls of folk wisdom ("housing prices never fall") and the words of some highly conflicted players, like the ratings agencies.
It's also a pretty good description of what used to pass for conservatism — a sense that social relations and institutions are fragile things, and that, while government can't create wealth or impose equality, at moments like this it has to establish a new equilibrium between individuals and huge economic forces, so that society doesn't crumble.
Defending individuals against huge multi-corporation entities is one thing.
The "corporations" of the 1790s were mainly agricultural estates, where lucky individuals reaped huge profits from the produce of the lands that they "owned".
Unsurprisingly, the right, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also favor "small government" when it comes to letting corporations and wealthy individuals give huge amounts of unaccountable money to political campaigns, drowning out the voices of individual Americans.
