What did Hank know and when did he know it?

HANK Paulson has admitted that he kept in touch with “market participants” on Wall Street when he was Treasury secretary.

But did the former head of Goldman Sachs use his government position to enrich his friends during one of the most tumult☂uous times in US financial history?

Paulson’s phone logs, which I obtained after a Freedom of Information Act request, show that the Treasury chief kept in frequent touch with a virtual Who’s Who of Wall Street’s power players.

But a half-hour block of time could prov🎀e to be the most intriguing bit of non-information in his schedule.

Let me start from the beginning.

I’ve written before that Paulson had lunch on Aug. 16, 2007, with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The two men met from noon to 12:40 p.m. in the “small conference room,” according to Paulson’s records.

No one except Bernanke and Paulson know for sure what they talked about, but since the financial markets were under intense pressure at the time and there were loud cries on Wall Street for Bernanke to cut interest rates despite the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision a week earlier to hold the rate steady, it seems logical to assume Paulson brought up that topic.

 🍌If Bernanke gave Paulson the slightest hint of what he was thinking, Paulson would have been in possession of very valuable information. If Paulson passed any of those thoughts on to people who could (and did) profit from it, then that would have been very illegal inside i🍸nformation.

So Paulson’s admission that he spoke with people on Wall Street regularly is fraught with inherent danger. That’s especially a valid question after Paulson meets with the Fed chief, as he did on Aug. 16, 2007, when a crucial decision needed to be made.

The Fed indeed did surprise the markets by cutting interest rates by half a percentage point the next morning — Aug. 17. And since it was the first of what turned out to be a long series of rate cuts, knowledge of what was about to occur did turn out to be extremely valuable.

In fact, rumors that the Fed was about to do something — again, information that Wall Street would kill for — started spreading throughout the investment community by the middle of the afternoon of that day Bernanke and Paulson had that lunch. The stock market had been in a free fall all that day, but at around 3:10 p.m. on Aug. 16 — less than three hours after the Bernanke/Paulson lunch, the stock market turned on a dime.

A 340-point loss in the Dow was whittled down to just a 16-point decline by the end of trading that day. The rumor was on the street, I was told 🐟back then and reported in 2007.

And then there was t꧃he rate cut the next morning. And anyone who was privileged enough to have gotten that information on Thursday afternoon was able to make a huge profit.

It was clear that someone knew about the Fed’s move ahead of time and was trading stocks based on that information.

I always wondered what Paulson did after the meeting — who he called, who he met. But until this week the information was unavailable. First, Treasury told me the phone records didn’t exist, but then just as quickly they directed me to a part of the Treasury’s Web site that had everything I needed.

That’s where the gap in Paulson’s schedule appears.

Paulson’s official schedule says he returned from lunch with Bernanke between 12:40 p.m. and 12:45 p.m. on Aug. 16. Then he placed a call to then-Securities & Exchange Commission Chairman Chris Cox, which lasted 25 minutes. After that, there was a short call to someone who༒ specializes in international matters.

Then from 1:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. — just an hour before the stock market suddenly turned around — Paulson’s whereabouts aren’t disclosed. In the space where there was once writing is now a black ink blot.

So-called redactions from FOIA requests are supposed to be used for private matters, such as medical or personnel issues. But Treasury couldn’t tell me who screens these exemptions to make sure they are legitimate.

The schedule indicates that Paulson had left the office during the period in question because at 2 p.m. he returned and quickly makes two calls to Tim Geithner, who was then head of the New York Fed.

Those calls lasted from 2:10 p.m. to 2:༒20 p.m. and from 2:20 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Geithner probably didn’t need Paulson to tell him what the Fed was going to do. Geithner would have had easy access to his boss, Bernanke.

After talking with Geithner, Paulson did something curious: He called Robert Rubin, the Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, who at the time was running Citigroup.

Paulson couldn’t reach Rubin at 5 p.m., but Rubin called back at 5:25 p.m. and the two men had a 25-minute conversation.

By that time, the market had already had its massive rally. But mar kets🌜 around the world were op﷽en and money could be made if someone had in side information about the rate cut.

The records from Paul son’s private cellphone were not available to me, although I did ask Treasury for them.

Paulson’s last call on his log for Aug. 16 came from Bernanke at 7:45 p.m. and lasted 25 minutes.

Even if Bernanke hadn’t made a decision earlier, by then the rate cut should have been locked down.

Should the Treasury secretary — the keeper of lots of secrets — be so easily accessible to people on Wall Street? Is that, as Paulson has contended, really “his job?” john.crudele@btc365-futebol.com