Henry Paulson, the former Treasury secretary, will serve on the board of Mayor Bloomberg's charitable foundation, the New York Times reports.

The Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, was on the "Today" show this morning describing his own administration's aid to Wall Street as "deeply unfair." He said this "basis sense of unfairness" is "driving so much anger and frustration across the country." Remember, this is the guy whose policy it was, out on television trying to defend it. If this is what defenders of the policy say, who needs critics?

Marc De Vos had an op-ed piece on this site back in January about what he called "a general rise of state-directed capitalism." Now Bloomberg News has an interview with him.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is out with his annual letter to shareholders, and it's full of interesting points.

Sometimes, he sounds almost like a socialist, or just plain confused, defending capitalism with the argument that it's good at serving government: "In 2009, among their many activities, our investment bankers…Raised $102 billion for states, municipalities, hospitals, schools and not-for-profits – to help build roads and bridges, improve social services, renovate local hospitals and train people for employment," he writes. "We were the only bank willing to commit to lend $4 billion to the state of California, $2 billion to the state of New Jersey and $1 billion to the state of Illinois."

The investment bankers also, he says, "Invested in 58 U.S. wind farms spread across 16 states. This portfolio can produce 5,843 megawatts of capacity – enough energy to power some 1.6 million U.S. homes. We also are a leader in sourcing, developing and trading emission-reduction credits."

Michael Barone has a new column this morning on what he calls a debate beween Founders and Progressives. "Americans today prefer independence to dependence on government, just as they did 200 years ago":

it became apparent that centralized experts weren't disinterested, but always sought to expand their power. And it became clear that central planners can never have the kind of information that is transmitted instantly, as Friedrich von Hayek observed, by price signals in free markets. It turned out that centralized experts are not as wise and ordinary Americans are not as helpless as the Progressives thought.

That was a good Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this week on Sallie Mae, but it missed one potentially significant point; according to this Mark Knoller tweet, student loan repayments are now limited to a maximum of 10% of annual income, with forgiveness after 10 years. Yet more incentive for graduating college students to head off into non-profit or entry-level government work, or to do something else that keeps their income low enough that it caps their loan repayment.

The latest "Libertarian" column on Forbes.com by law professor Richard Epstein is about the Federal Housing Administration's plan to modify principal on mortgages:

The desire to have more Americans own their own homes led in the early 2000s to a flawed bipartisan government decision to subsidize home ownership. The government promoted low-interest mortgages to high-risk customers, who promptly paid inflated prices on homes to garner the government subsidy. Thus the subprime market was born. ... Once the bubble bursts, there is no elegant way to pick up the pieces when real estate values have plummeted by 50% or more. So just enforce the contracts as written and work for quick and final bank foreclosures.The hard-line libertarian view looks harsh in the short run, but in fact it offers the best chance for long-run recovery.

We're catching up with this a few days late, but it's too good to let pass: at the conclusion of a long New York Times article on Mayor Bloomberg ending a program of grants through the Carnegie Corporation, comes this, citing Carnegie's president, Vartan Gregorian:

Mr. Gregorian said it was almost impossible to capture how meaningful Mr. Bloomberg's contributions were to the city's arts and social services communities. Even as the mayor shifts his charitable giving to his foundation, Mr. Gregorian is certain Mr. Bloomberg will continue to be a major philanthropic force.

"He shares Andrew Carnegie's notion that the person who dies rich dies disgraced, because he does not have the imagination to reinvest the money into society," he said.

In the post about Paulson & Co.'s $32 billion in assets under management we mentioned that one benefit of being that big is that you get invited to meetings like the one the FDIC held last week. Representing Paulson & Co. at the meeting, according to a participants list, was a senior vice president, Allen Puwalski, whose "Linked In" resume reports that he was chief of bank analysis at the FDIC from 2003 to 2005.

Other participants included John L. Douglas, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell. Mr. Douglas, who was general counsel of the FDIC from 1987 to 1989, lately has been "counseling Citigroup with respect to FDIC matters," according to his law firm's Web site.

Posting here will be light to nonexistent tomorrow and Wednesday because of Passover, the Jewish holiday commemorating the Exodus from slavery to freedom. The New York Times reports that Michelle Obama's chief of staff is speculating that "taking care of people who can't take care of themselves and health care reform" may be themes at this year's White House Passover seder. My own take on the Exodus story and freedom has been as it relates to Samuel Adams, the founding father I wrote a biography of:

Again and again, both subtly and directly, Adams placed the American colonists in the role of the Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt and likened the British to the oppressive Egyptians.

Vice President Biden just sent me an e-mail with the attention-grabbing subject line "Literally Putting Money Back in Your Pocket." The email goes on:

Good morning,

I'm writing you today to talk about literally putting money back in your pocket....Did you know, for example, that 95% of working families have been getting money in their paychecks in 2009 from the Recovery Act's $400 to $800 a year Making Work Pay tax credit –- and will continue to in 2010?

If you didn't know that, you may not know about all of the other tax cuts that may be available to you as a result of the Recovery Act -- refunds relating to everything from college tuition to new cars to new houses to using more renewable energy. The reason the President fought for all of these tax cuts as part of the Recovery Act was to give middle class families a little extra break in what continues to be a tough economic time -- and also to help give the economy itself a boost.

This month's credit card bills are the first ones I got that carried big new warnings mandated by the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009. When President Obama signed the law he described it "a turning point for American consumers." On the basis of this round of bills I'm not convinced. The main change visible to me is that the bills now carry prominently displayed warnings about the late fees and the payment due dates. It's quite possible that some consumers will react to these warning by being more likely to pay their credit card bills on time. These consumers won't have to pay the late fees and the banks will make less money on fees and on interest that they charge to credit cad customers who carry a balance. That's what Mr. Obama was touting when it came to consumer protection.

A FutureOfCapitalism.com reader writes in to ask about the mutual fund company Vanguard, which is running advertisements in the Sunday New York Times. "Would you still buy this paper if it cost 5 times more?" ask the ads, which are trying to make a virtue out of Vanguard's low fees. It's an odd combination of advertisement and placement, because readers who are plunking down $5 (inside the city) or $6 or more outside for a Sunday Times by definition are spending a lot more than five times what it costs to read the New York Times online (free), and several times what it would cost to read a competing newspaper.

A New York Fire Department official is retiring at age 63 with a $242,000 a year government pension for the rest of his life, much of it tax-free. Some of it is disability-related, but the on-the-job knee injury isn't so bad that it prevents the guy from regularly playing golf, the New York Post reports. We've been mentioning the point regularly around here that government pay is higher than private sector pay.

Bloomberg has a whole news article debating whether John Paulson's $32 billion in assets under management at Paulson & Co. makes him "too big to succeed." It's funny how Bloomberg sees this as a concern for a $32 billion hedge fund, but not for Pimco, which has $1 trillion in assets under management. The nice thing about being big is that Paulson & Co. now gets invited to closed-door meetings like this one recently held by the FDIC.