Word: berlins
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When the nearly bankrupt city of Berlin was looking for a way to finance its public-transportation system a decade ago, some American investors had an idea that seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately for Berlin...
...scheme seemed a bit convoluted from the start, but it offered oodles of money to the participants. An American investor agreed to lease tram and subway cars from BVG, Berlin's mass-transit company. And BVG, in turn, leased them back for terms ranging from 12 to 30 years. Under U.S. tax law at the time, the American investor was able to take a depreciation tax benefit on the equipment because it was held on a long-term lease - a financial benefit the investor shared with BVG. (Read about Paris' public bicycle system...
Between 1997 and 2004, Berlin's public transportation company entered into 22 such lease and lease-back deals, covering a total of 511 tram cars and 647 subway cars, with various American investors...
...insured their assets with AIG or Lehman Brothers. So after those two pillars of U.S. finance crumbled, German cities suddenly faced the risk of having to make huge payments - taken together, as much as €30 billion ($40 billion), according to some estimates - to their American investors. (Read "Why Berlin Says U.S. 'Bad Bank' Plan...
...case of BVG, the insurance was provided by Hypo-Vereinsbank, the Landesbank Berlin (LBB) and Credit Suisse. The LBB was privatized in 2007. Expecting that LBB would be downgraded by ratings agencies, BVG was planning to insure its assets through another state-owned bank in Germany, the Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg. But city officials say BVG's advisor, J.P. Morgan, suggested the transit company spread the risk by insuring the deal through a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO, backed by a consortium of some 150 banks and insurers that included AIG and Lehman Brothers...