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...What doomed AIG was the rating agencies' decision - they had suddenly awakened to AIG's problems - to sharply downgrade the firm's securities. That gave AIG no time to react, no time to raise more capital, no more time to do anything else but beg for help. Because AIG is in a much scarier situation than Lehman - the insurer has assets of $1 trillion, more than 70 million customers and intimate back-and-forth dealings with many of the world's biggest and most important financial firms - Uncle Sam felt that it had no choice but to intervene...
...right, of course, but even he wasn't paranoid enough. Though Goldman stands, along with Morgan Stanley, as one of the last two giant U.S. investment banks not to collapse (as Lehman and Bear Stearns have) or be sold (à la Merrill Lynch), Goldman too has been pummeled. The firm's quarterly profit plunged 70% - results considered to be relatively good. While analysts generally believe that Goldman and Morgan Stanley will survive the meltdown, that view is not unanimous. Says doomster New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini: "They will be gone in a matter of months as well...
...trades are short sales. And outfits including Goldman and Morgan Stanley are no strangers to going short in their proprietary trading strategies. All the short sellers are going to do is make the market react faster, he says. "The question is, Can the short seller take a firm down? The answer is no. Not by themselves. If there is nothing fundamentally wrong, all you need is a couple of smart people on the other side to show that they're wrong," says Asquith...
...Paulson was nominated by President George W. Bush to assume the secretary's post in 2006 and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, replacing John Snow. Previously he had served as Chairman and CEO of investment banking giant Goldman Sachs from 1999 to 2006, during which he led the firm through a period of whopping growth. He embraced risk, taking on debt and betting big when the odds dictated it. Now he is charged with cleaning up the sizable mess left by an epidemic of risk-taking run amok...
Disillusioned by the administration's corruption, Paulson joined Goldman's Chicago office in 1974. His rise in the investment bank was meteoric (he made vice president within four years), and in 1998 he became co-CEO alongside current New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine. Paulson presided over the firm's immensely profitable IPO in 1999 - an offering to which he had long objected - and reaped the dividends immediately. Overnight, his holdings in Goldman rocketed from $95 million to $315 million. Though his ascent to Treasury Secretary in 2006 was by all accounts a promotion, it was nonetheless a sharp blow...