Overlooked financial anecdotes from an early Bush-era tell-all.

The passage wasn't picked up by any news outlets at the time; Suskind mentioned it offhandedly in an opinion column in September, but neither he nor O'Neill have "outed" the steadfastly oblivious financier.

So who was the cavalier CEO? It might have been AIG's Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, but it's hard to think the statement wouldn't have come back to haunt him when he was sued by Eliot Spitzer and forced to resign over disclosure-and-accounting offenses three years later in 2005. Lehman Bros. CEO Dick Fuld, who ended up losing his whole firm over a stubborn unwillingness to keep himself informed of what its various divisions were doing, was also there; if it was him, it's hard to think those words were far from Paulson's mind when he let Lehman fail in September. It also could have been Citigroup's Sandy Weill or then-Merrill Lynch CEO David Komansky; they were there, too.

But O'Neill and his spokeswoman, Michele Davis, seemed to be the only ones left smarting by the statement. The book doesn't say what O'Neill's longtime pal and partner in policymaking Alan Greenspan had to say about it, although it's hard to believe, given the closeness of their relationship—Suskind likened them to an old married couple—the treasury secretary didn't share it with the Fed chief, especially since the two had just days before been agonizing over the question of how to adequately incentivize CEOs to respect the long-term health of their countries.

But the Greenspan of Suskind's book is not the Greenspan who arrogantly (in concert with his felllow fallen finance guru Bob Rubin) struck down Commodity and Futures Trading Commission Chairman Brooksley Born's proposals to regulate over-the-counter derivatives or whose reckless monetary policy is directly responsible for the housing crisis; it's the old Greenspan, a data-obsessed wonk whose only major difference from the inquisitive, independent-minded O'Neill is, from O'Neill's perspective anyway, that he never got rich. (Also, Greenspan drinks decaf.) Greenspan helps lure O'Neill back to Washington with visions of the Social Security reform they could enact with the $5 trillion surpluses he estimates they could pile up before the end of the decade if Bush keeps up Clinton's fiscal prudence. ("It's certainly not money in the bank," Greenspan cautions, to which I found myself actually mouthing, "No shit.")

Still, there are hints that Greenspan will prove a big disappointment to pragmatists like O'Neill. He allows ideologues like Larry Lindsey to carry debate and produces a policy memo on corporate governance that seems seriously lukewarm in hindsight. Most insidiously, he almost immediately gives up his dreams of a surplus to lend all but his explicit support to the Bush tax cuts by the dubious logic that a big surplus would put the government in the position of having too great a role in the market.

But Greenspan was nothing if not politically shrewd, and it was clear the Bush administration had no intention of enforcing any sort of fiscal discipline. Just before his resignation after the 2002 midterm elections, O'Neill finds himself at a remarkable working session at which Karl Rove and Larry Lindsey persuade Bush to propose his second tax cut in as many years engineered to disproportionately benefit the wealthy. The president is not immediately convinced, asking of O'Neill why wages are stagnant and of his assembled advisers, "What are we doing on compassion?"