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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist
I'm not exactly sure why today's keynote conversation at the BIO International Convention was closed to the "mainstream media." (It was open to biotech industry trade reporters.) Nothing controversial was discussed, no news was made, and there was no time for a question-and-answer session. Mostly, two collegial former U.S. Treasury Secretaries defended their past actions, forecast some continued choppiness for the global economy, and expressed optimism that the U.S. will be able to avoid capsizing, by arriving at some kind of bipartisan compromise (after this year's Presidential election) to increase taxes and cut spending. Little was discussed that had specific relevance to biotech or pharmaceutical companies, which probably explained why the ballroom at the Boston Convention & Expo Center was more than half empty by the time the session wrapped up at 2 p.m.James Greenwood, a former congressman from Pennsylvania who is now CEO of the trade group BIO, moderated the conversation, asking first about bailing out companies and countries deemed "too big to fail." Both Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, Jr. acknowledged the problems that bailouts can create, by neutralizing any penalties for the same risky behavior that created the crisis in the first place. "You never really break the cycle of financial crises followed by bailouts," Paulson said. "The best we can hope is to mitigate it." Paulson served as Secretary of the Treasury from 2006 to 2009, and is also a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. (He's on the right in the photo.)
