Word: aig
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...Then Geithner's staff made the discovery that would infuriate nearly everyone in Washington. On March 10, the Secretary learned, 10 days after his staff first got wind of it, that AIG had paid out $165 million in retention bonuses to executives at the unit that compelled the U.S. to bail out the company in the first place. It took Geithner until 7:40 the next night to place what must have been a tense phone call to AIG's newish CEO, Ed Liddy. The bonuses were not tenable; they had to be canceled, he demanded. Liddy, a dollar...
...balance sheet of debacles caused by this economic crisis - the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the stock-market swoon, the credit crunch and the ongoing global recession - $165 million is small change. But the revelations of the AIG bonuses, like nothing else, seemed to finally tip the mounting public furor over corporate malpractice into a full-scale rebellion. Yet Geithner, embarrassed for discovering the bonuses so late, plans to dock AIG that much out of the next $30 billion in bailout funding when it is delivered - which amounts to a mere 0.1% of the total AIG has received...
...With all the political theater and populist grandstanding, though, the bigger issue has been obscured. And that is, Just what is AIG doing with the $170 billion? Does the company's strategy, which is to wind down its exposure to toxic assets and sell some of its profitable insurance divisions to help pay off the government debt, stand a good chance of succeeding? And if it does, will the world avert financial Armageddon...
...Those questions have taken on greater urgency, since it turns out that AIG has become the banking industry's ATM, essentially passing along $52 billion of TARP money to an array of U.S. and foreign financial institutions - from Goldman Sachs to Switzerland's UBS. Those firms were counterparties to the credit-default swaps (CDSs) that AIG FP sold at least through 2005, and the companies were collecting on the insurance-like derivatives. AIG paid out an additional $43.7 billion to many of the same banks, which were also customers of the securities-lending operation run out of AIG's insurance...
...outrage will pass, and when it does, we're going to have to focus on whether keeping AIG afloat is preventing a sharp recession from becoming a prolonged one. The reason AIG has cost taxpayers $170 billion - and the reason the Obama Administration seemed willing, at least at first, to hold its nose and accede to bonuses for the company's managers - is that it's too big to fail. It's an often heard phrase, but what does it really mean? (See the top 10 financial collapses...