Word: bond
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According to a report 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...
...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...
...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 the bonds had fallen significantly in price...
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...
...idea that you had to come to some unified settlement with all of the banks was ridiculous," says Thomas Adams, a lawyer at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at bond insurer FGIC. "But that seems to be the working logic at the Federal Reserve." (See TIME's 2009 Person of the Year: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke...