Word: globalization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...idea is that in a global economy so tightly linked that problems in the U.S. real estate market can help bring down Icelandic banks and Asian manufacturers, AIG sits at some of the critical switch points. Its failure, so the fear goes, would set off chains of others, rattling around the globe in short order. Although some critics say the fear is overblown and the world economy could absorb the blow, no one seems particularly keen on testing that approach...
...dirty laundry. The government owned 80% of the company, and Geithner had just orchestrated AIG's most recent handout - its fourth, if you are keeping score, for $30 billion on March 2 - to prevent the teetering insurance giant from going over the cliff and taking the rest of the global financial system with it. AIG had already cost the taxpayers some $170 billion, mostly to repair the damage done by one of its units, AIG Financial Products (AIG FP), which last year alone piled up $40 billion in losses related to its dealings in complex mortgage bond derivatives...
...balance sheet of debacles caused by this economic crisis - the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the stock-market swoon, the credit crunch and the ongoing global recession - $165 million is small change. But the revelations of the AIG bonuses, like nothing else, seemed to finally tip the mounting public furor over corporate malpractice into a full-scale rebellion. Yet Geithner, embarrassed for discovering the bonuses so late, plans to dock AIG that much out of the next $30 billion in bailout funding when it is delivered - which amounts to a mere 0.1% of the total AIG has received...
...Here AIG seems an unlikely candidate for the company that could bankrupt the planet. Founded 90 years ago in Shanghai, AIG moved its headquarters to New York City as the world headed toward war in 1939. After Maurice R. (Hank) Greenberg took over in 1967, AIG consolidated its global empire. By the time Greenberg was forced out in an accounting scandal 38 years later, AIG had become one of the world's biggest public companies, with sales of $113 billion in 2006 and 116,000 employees in 130 countries, from France to China...
...times its capacity to pay out if the portfolios defaulted. Few financial experts ever imagined the scope of the impending defaults. Neither did regulators. AIG's uncollateralized insurance combine was regulated by Washington's Office of Thrift Supervision, whose task is to watch over savings-and-loan companies, not global insurers. And it wasn't watching...