Word: cassano
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Greenberg is not likely to escape tough questions. It was Greenberg, after all, who supervised Joseph Cassano, chief of AIG's Financial Products (FP) unit, whose sales of uncollateralized credit-default swaps brought down the company. Representative Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat and committee member, blamed Greenberg for "allowing a culture to develop that completely contradicted the insurance-company ethic of limiting risk." Greenberg, Welch said, is trying to redeem his reputation on the grounds that "he was out the door before the roof fell...
...While AIG's holdings are diverse, nearly all its losses centered on AIG FP, which until March 2008 was led by its high-rolling president, Joseph Cassano, a tough-talking Brooklyn, N.Y., native who in the past eight years banked $280 million in cash compensation, or exactly $115 million more than the bonuses at the center of the current controversy. Cassano, who helped found the AIG FP unit in 1987, built his money machine not on anything fraudulent but on what's been described as regulatory arbitrage. As Bernanke explained recently, "AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system...
...With its high credit rating, AIG FP wasn't required to stockpile reserves, or collateral, as traditional insurers must to cover potential losses. As the CDOs that AIG insured began to crater, the counterparties began asking for more collateral to back their policies, which was written into the contracts. Cassano said in August 2007 that he couldn't imagine a situation in which AIG would "lose one dollar in any of these transactions." He was right. AIG didn't lose a dollar; it lost billions of them...
...rare interview, former CEO Greenberg, who is suing AIG and being sued by the company over financial-management issues, tells TIME that once the company lost its top credit rating, AIG FP should have stopped writing swaps and hedged, or reinsured, its existing ones. But Cassano's unit doubled down after the spring of 2005, writing more and more subprime-linked swaps as the ratings plunged, which made the possible need for collateral enormous in the event its debt was downgraded. The downgrades occurred in 2008. "Of course they were going to run out of money," says Greenberg. He adds...
...desperation (vs. Romania) and redemption (vs. France)- are going to need some new actors. Italy's maestro Andrea Pirlo is suspended, as is their Rottweiler defensive midfielder Gennaro Gattuso. On the plus side, striker Luca Toni has to find the net sooner or later, and bad boy forward Antonio Cassano has put real menace in Italy's attack. But if this is indeed a newly mature Spanish side, as coach Luis Aragonés says, "The only thing we need now is a positive attitude. We have to forget it is Italy or whoever and think about winning - that...