Word: aig
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...bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was not a precedent, and that the Federal Government would not be lender of last resort to Wall Street? The public did, but Wall Street didn't. If the bank was open for Bear and Freddie and Fannie, why not Lehman and AIG? It took a high noon showdown over the weekend for Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson - one of Wall Street's own - to convince the Street's gunslingers that he wasn't kidding about the moral hazard issue...
After establishing a supposed hard line against bailouts over the weekend with Lehman Brothers, the government abruptly abandoned it Tuesday and announced an $85 billion Federal Reserve loan to insurance giant AIG. The explanation: AIG was deemed too huge (its assets top $1 trillion), too global and too interconnected to fail...
...That, and the fact that unlike with Lehman - where the possibility of failure was openly discussed for months and to a certain extent planned for - federal officials and market participants don't seem to have really focused on AIG's problems until this week. While the company's insurance subsidiaries are regulated by New York insurance superintendent Eric Dinallo, it is overseen at the holding company level by the federal Office of Thrift Supervision, which mostly regulates the savings and loan industry. Plus, it was awfully hard for outsiders - and even insiders - to understand the gravity of the company...
...particular risks that brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy seem to lie not with its core insurance businesses but with its derivatives-trading subsidiary AIG Financial Products. AIG FP, as it's called, merits a mere paragraph in the nine-page description of the company's businesses in its most recent annual report. But it's a huge player in the new and mysterious business of credit-default swaps: derivative securities that allow banks, hedge funds and other financial players to insure against loans gone...
...AIG generally sells credit-default swaps, thereby promising to insure others against defaults. It's a great business when defaults are low; when they rise it can turn toxic. AIG FP lost more than $10 billion in 2007 and $14.7 billion in the first six months of this year. That, along with losses in other investment portfolios, has cut deeply into the parent company's capital reserves. The credit-default-swap contracts decree that if AIG's credit rating drops below a certain level, it has to fork over $13 billion in collateral to the buyers of the swaps. Monday...