Word: blackrock
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...certain that any of the banks would, at the end of the day, have gone along with any offers from BlackRock, an adviser to the Fed. Nor is it clear whether any deals would have been more profitable for AIG, given the rebound in the credit markets. But what is clear is that the troubled insurer had more room to bargain than it and its government rescuers have let on. AIG and BlackRock declined to comment both on the bond manager's report and AIG's bond-insurance dealings. (See the best business deals...
Back in late 2008, though, even at the height of the financial crisis, BlackRock believed AIG could have struck deals with the big banks that would have saved the company money. At issue were the credit-default swaps - essentially bond insurance that would pay out if borrowers didn't - that AIG had sold to a number of large banks and financial firms. Lawyers say there would have been nothing legally wrong with AIG's negotiating to pay some banks less than others on the CDS insurance they had bought from AIG. In fact, since the CDS contracts insured different bonds...
...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...
...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 and German financial giant Deutsche Bank were also willing to strike deals...
...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...