Word: aig
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...That hedge-fund-like unit built up a portfolio of $2.7 trillion in derivatives. AIG FP eagerly offered to insure billions of dollars in derivative portfolios, building up potential liabilities many times its capacity to pay out if the portfolios defaulted. Few financial experts ever imagined the scope of the impending defaults. Neither did regulators. AIG's uncollateralized insurance combine was regulated by Washington's Office of Thrift Supervision, whose task is to watch over savings-and-loan companies, not global insurers. And it wasn't watching...
...AIG, like other institutions, was making a mint dealing in derivatives tied to the U.S. real estate market. The boom was financed in part by collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), securities based on subprime mortgages that have come to define toxic asset. Companies that held CDOs could offset their risk by buying CDSs from AIG FP. Or they could simply speculate with the instrument. It all worked fine until overbuilding by housing firms and overleveraging by consumers caused the bubble to burst. Which in turn caused the value of CDOs to plunge. Which caused holders of CDSs on such securities...
...Although a CDS is, in its simplest form, an insurance policy, AIG was selling something far more exotic. Say you buy a house and insure it. The insurer doesn't offer the same policy on your house to everyone else in the neighborhood; if it did and your house went up in flames, the insurer could get wiped out. In its CDS contracts, though, AIG wrote multiple insurance policies covering the same underlying package of increasingly toxic assets. In essence, it was underwriting systemic risk. This is the opposite of what insurance companies are supposed to do: diversify risk across...
...With its high credit rating, AIG FP wasn't required to stockpile reserves, or collateral, as traditional insurers must to cover potential losses. As the CDOs that AIG insured began to crater, the counterparties began asking for more collateral to back their policies, which was written into the contracts. Cassano said in August 2007 that he couldn't imagine a situation in which AIG would "lose one dollar in any of these transactions." He was right. AIG didn't lose a dollar; it lost billions of them...
...rare interview, former CEO Greenberg, who is suing AIG and being sued by the company over financial-management issues, tells TIME that once the company lost its top credit rating, AIG FP should have stopped writing swaps and hedged, or reinsured, its existing ones. But Cassano's unit doubled down after the spring of 2005, writing more and more subprime-linked swaps as the ratings plunged, which made the possible need for collateral enormous in the event its debt was downgraded. The downgrades occurred in 2008. "Of course they were going to run out of money," says Greenberg. He adds...