Word: defaultations
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...years the financial markets - and many borrowers - showed no fear at all. Wall Streeters didn't have to worry about regulation, which was in disrepute, and they didn't worry about risk, which had supposedly been magically whisked away by all sorts of spiffy nouveau products - derivatives like credit-default swaps. (More on those later.) This lack of fear became a hothouse of greed and ignorance on Wall Street - and on Main Street as well. When greed exceeds fear, trouble follows. Wall Street has always been a greedy place and every decade or so it suffers a blow resulting...
...Uncle Sam Steps Back In The market lost faith in AIG too, but the government was forced to save it. A major reason is that AIG is one of the creators of the aforementioned credit-default swaps. What are those, you ask? They're pixie-dust securities that supposedly offer insurance against a company defaulting on its obligations. If you buy $10 million of GM bonds, for instance, you might hedge your bet by buying a $10 million CDS from AIG. In return for that premium - which changes day to day - AIG agrees to give you $10 million should...
...case of AIG, the argument is that the company would have remained afloat had its stock price not been driven down, which triggered a credit downgrading that then required AIG to raise $14 billion in capital overnight to meet collateral requirements on its credit default swaps...
...business grew and migrated from banks to firms like Bear Stearns and AIG, is a big reason why the world's financial markets are in such crisis this week. Bear and AIG were bailed out in part because they were big players in the market for credit default swaps, derivatives that are meant to insure against loans gone bad. Regulators have such an unclear picture of who's on the hook to whom in this market that they feared the collapse of either firm would spark a chain reaction of defaults, and investors are so panicked by the unknown that...
...alone. The best case for the bailout seems to be that nobody has the faintest idea what the consequences of AIG's failure for financial markets would be, but the fear was that it could lead to total chaos. The biggest fears had to do with the credit-default swaps, which AIG appears to have sold in large quantities to practically every financial institution of significance on the planet. RBC Capital Markets analyst Hank Calenti estimated Tuesday that AIG's failure would cost its swap counterparties $180 billion...