So this is kind of like that: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim may invest “hundreds of millions” in the paper via what amounts to a high-interest loan. Slim, a telecom magnate whom Forbes pegged as the second richest man in the world last year, is looking at buying a slug of preferred stock in the New York Times (NYT), The Wall Street Journal reports.

If the deal goes through, it will give the Times some breathing room to deal with its cash crunch–it has $46 million in cash and more than $1 billion in debt, with a $400 million revolver that winds down in May. But it won’t solve its core problem– print ad dollars are disappearing and it hasn’t figured out how to replace them on the Web.

The breathing room will be expensive, too. But the paper doesn’t have many options at this point. WSJ:

For the Sulzberger family, which controls the Times through super-voting shares, the advantage of such a move would be that it would give the company capital without forcing them to relinquish control or dilute other shareholders. The downside is that the cost of such capital is generally very high.

When Goldman Sachs Group Inc needed $5 billion in September, for example, it found a willing investor in Warren Buffett but only after agreeing to pay a 10% dividend on perpetual preferred shares. Yet with credit tight, especially for companies like the Times that have poor credit ratings, many lenders have few options but to accept onerous terms.

Mr. Slim, who is said to be worth $60 billion, already had a 6.4% stake as of the end of September. The value of the investment has dropped by more than half…since then and is now worth about $60 million. At the time of the investment, a spokesman for Mr. Slim said the 68-year-old billionaire simply saw an opportunity for a piece of a ‘great’ company at an ‘attractive’ price and had no plans to take a role in its management or board.”

The Times declined to comment on the report to me, but Reuters has followed up with a story of its own confirming the basics of the WSJ account.

FBN is describing the chat as an “exclusive,” which is true in the sense that it is the only one running an interview with Buffett at 4 p.m. Eastern today–he tends to be fairly visible these days. Still, there’s some good stuff here, and not all of it is depressing. Excerpts follow:

On Unemployment:

“There are going to be more people unemployed…but I’m not worried about how we come out in the end. I mean, I’m not worried about five years from now. Five months from now, can be very painful…it will be considerably higher…. It will happen eventually [surpassing 8%], and we will go on to new heights, but it will not turn around by mid-year next year.”

On Berkshire Hathaway’s Stock Plummeting:

“No, it doesn’t make any difference. I mean, if you don’t own it on margin, you own a business…. I look to the business to determine my results. I’ll say it’s happened to me three other times in my life, too. It happened when it went from 90 to 40 back in 1974, and it happened in 1987. It went down 50 percent in 1998 to 2000. I mean, I hope I live long enough so it happens a couple more times to me.”

On the Auto Bailouts:

“I would drive a deal like I would drive myself if I were buying a business. And I think, I would say there’s plan A or plan B.  And if you don’t want to do it this way, you know, then…take bankruptcy.

“I would make the CEOs buy in. I would say, you know, the United States government is willing to put in X dollars, but we’re going to have you put in a certain percentage of your net worth right along with us.  We’ll give you more upside, but you’re going to lose if we lose.”

On the Future of Goldman Sachs:

“Their businesses are all tough now, but they’re going to get around it…. This time, the institutions got very, very leveraged, and when the whole world tries to be leveraged at one time, I mean, there is a lot of pain that goes around. But you know, the Goldman’s of the world, they’re going to be around. Some of them needed, I mean, not Goldman specifically, but some of them needed the help of the TARP.”

On the President’s Role in the Bailouts:

“I think really only the president can do that effectively. I think it’s very difficult for the Congress, where you’ve got 535 people where each–you know, one guy has a plan for Chrysler and somebody else has another–and I think that–and you have to have somebody who can deliver, who can say, if you do these things, we will come up with a solution. But if you don’t have a business solution, they’ll just be putting money in every year for the–you know, as long as the federal government’s around.”

On Being the Next Treasury Secretary:

“Well, I haven’t been asked. And I won’t be asked. But the answer is I wouldn’t give up my job. I’m glad to help in any way I can, but I would not do it.

“So I think, you know, we’ll know in a few days, perhaps, who the Treasury secretary will be. And we’ll go from there.”

On President-Elect Barack Obama:

“I think that Barack–I think that Hillary would have made a good president too, and I think Barack will make a terrific president. I think he’s the right person for this time…you need a strong, decisive, smart leader, who can communicate very well with the American people at a time like this. They need somebody they believe in, and I think that he has the qualities that are right for this time.”

On Selling Investments:

“…I do sell stocks. Not very often…if we’re going to put the money in the Goldman Sachs preferred or the General Electric preferred, the Mars-Wrigley deal, to some extent, if we have the money around we’ll use the money that is in cash. But I like to keep a lot of money around, so I will sell some things if I need to sell them in order to buy something else…. We don’t sell businesses, though. Businesses we own we keep.”

On His Next Investment Pick:

Not right now.  But that could change tomorrow. Both GE and Goldman Sachs happened on a phone call I got in the morning and I said yes.  It was–that’s that, something like that.

On Henry Paulson:

“I think it’s a very, very tough situation. There are no silver bullets here. It’s not like some one idea or three ideas that’s all of a sudden going to turn around the economy and the markets. We are in a negative feedback cycle. It’s going to last for a while. I don’t know how long it’s going to last…. And I don’t think I could have done a better job, and I don’t think most of the congressmen could do a better job…. I think that putting the capital in the various financial institutions, probably you’ll get more mileage out of that dollar spent than in the mortgage repurchase program.”