Word: banks
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...produced by a division of bond manager BlackRock in November 2008, AIG would probably have been able to strike settlements that, at least at the time, could have saved the giant troubled insurer, and taxpayers, billions of dollars. Instead, after a few days of harried discussions, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which was orchestrating the government's bailout of AIG - instructed the insurer to pay its counterparties, which included Goldman Sachs and a number of European banks, in full. The BlackRock report is one of many documents recently unearthed by a congressional investigation into the controversial bailout...
...from the financial crisis. On Wednesday, a congressional hearing again probed the moves and possible mistakes the government made when it rescued the insurer. At the center of the hearing, which was held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, were the payments that AIG made to banks that bought credit-default-swap (CDS) bond insurance from the firm. Members of the panel grilled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in late 2008, as to why he allowed AIG to pay the banks the starting value of the CDS contracts when...
...BlackRock report said that five of the six biggest creditors of AIG's financial-products division would have been willing to end the contracts for less than face value. French bank Société Générale, which was AIG's largest CDS counterparty, for instance, according to Blackrock was willing to unwind the bond insurance its had bought from AIG on its lowest quality bonds for 90 cents on the dollar, or for 10% less than what AIG had originally promised to pay. About 30% of the $16.4 billion in CDS contracts that SocGen had bought...
...Other banks were willing to strike even more generous deals. UBS initially told AIG that it would take collateral worth 35% less than what the insurer owned on 55% of the $4.3 billion in CDS contracts it had sold to the Swiss bank. For the remaining 45%, UBS was willing to allow AIG to pay 10% less than what it had originally promised. Those deals would have saved AIG about $1 billion. AIG later broke off those negotiations, and as with all of its other counterparties, paid UBS in full. BlackRock, in the report, said Goldman Sachs, French bank Calyon...
BlackRock, though, stressed that it is unlikely that any of those banks would have been willing to make a "deep concession" on price. Nor is it clear that all of the deals, including those with SocGen or UBS, could have been completed. French regulators pressured SocGen and Calyon not to negotiate with AIG. What's more, BlackRock said that investment bank Merrill Lynch, which had recently agreed to be purchased by Bank of America, was not willing to strike a deal. If AIG had then paid off only Merrill's bond insurance in full, the other banks may have balked...