Word: defaults
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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...
...cash payments to CDS [credit-default swap] counterparties should never have occurred," Greenberg told a House oversight committee. Greenberg is not alone is raising questions about profits that financial firms have been making on the unwinding of AIG's derivative bets. Last week New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo said he was looking into AIG's trading records to examine whether the payments the company made to other financial firms were improper. (Read "How to Know When the Economy Is Turning...
...Last month AIG said it had paid out about $50 billion to various financial firms to which it had sold credit-default swaps, which are insurance contracts sold to bond investors and others. When a bond defaults, a holder of a CDS has the right to be reimbursed for the loss by the seller of the contract. AIG was one of the largest sellers of such contracts. Much of the credit insurance AIG sold was on mortgage bonds, which are backed by home loans. As more and more homeowners defaulted, many of those bonds plummeted in value, causing the holders...
...According to Harvard’s annual financial statement issued in October, the University continues to use a variety of financial instruments with undisclosed risk—including options, forwards, credit default swaps, and exchange agreements—to gain exposure to various asset classes without having to actually invest in those assets...
...that was before the bottom fell out from nearly every asset class. While some of the instruments, such as credit default swaps, may have hedged against the downturn, other derivative holdings have cost the University dearly. Harvard’s investments in interest-rate swaps, one class of derivative that may be used by both HMC and the University budget office to hedge against interests rate changes on variable-rate debt, would have cost $571 million to terminate as of Oct. 2008, according to a credit rating report from financial rating company Standard and Poor?...