It’s becoming harder and harder to believe that anyone is really in charge of the world’s largest economy. Each day brings a new catalogue of woes, miscues and missteps, each of which should have been foreseen long ago. And at the centre of each fresh foul-up stands one man: Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, ‘Hammerin’ Hank’, once boss of mighty Goldman Sachs, now reduced to a sort of Frank Spencer figure, constantly bemused by domestic disaster.

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