Hank Paulson's attempt to weasel out of an interview with the New York Times looks more comical every day. Now it's emerged that the book he was busy writing is being written by someone else.

Former Institutional Investor editor Michael Carroll is the apparent ghost writer for Paulson's memoirs, Heidi Moore writes in Daily Intel. And yet Paulson was too "busy writing" those memoirs to give an interview to the Times, his flack told the paper ahead of a big article questioning Paulson's calls to Goldman Sachs.

The flack also tried to claim Paulson had been barred from speaking by his publisher; this was refuted nearly instantly. It should be, on some level, comforting that the man once entrusted with distributing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars can't pull of the simplest of lies. And yet, it isn't, is it?