Monday, December 05, 2011

Hank Paulson: Facts and Figures - or Fiction?

Henry Paulson has had a distinguished career as CEO of Goldman Sachs and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush. As Treasury Secretary he was a key figure in the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
He's also known as an avid nature lover. In the article Birds and Bankers in the New Yorker he's quoted as saying, "The Amazon dumps enough fresh water in the ocean every hour to fill one Lake Superior.”
However, according to Wikipedia:
the water volume of Lake Superior is 12,000 cubic kilometers;
the average discharge of the Amazon River is approximately 209,000 cubic meters per second.
Based on those figures, according to my calculations it would actually take approximately 15,948 hours (1.82 years) for the Amazon River to discharge enough fresh water to fill Lake Superior.
I hope Secretary Paulson had superior sources of information while discharging his duties during the financial crisis.