Word: payes
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...strike settlements that, at least at the time, could have saved the giant troubled insurer, and taxpayers, billions of dollars. Instead, after a few days of harried discussions, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which was orchestrating the government's bailout of AIG - instructed the insurer to pay its counterparties, which included Goldman Sachs and a number of European banks, in full. The BlackRock report is one of many documents recently unearthed by a congressional investigation into the controversial bailout of AIG, which could still cost taxpayers as much as $180 billion...
...Government Reform, were the payments that AIG made to banks that bought credit-default-swap (CDS) bond insurance from the firm. Members of the panel grilled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in late 2008, as to why he allowed AIG to pay the banks the starting value of the CDS contracts when the bonds had fallen significantly in price. Other mortgage-bond insurers at the time were able to strike deals to tear up similar contracts and pay reduced prices. Some called the AIG payments, funded by the government, a backdoor bailout...
Back in late 2008, though, even at the height of the financial crisis, BlackRock believed AIG could have struck deals with the big banks that would have saved the company money. At issue were the credit-default swaps - essentially bond insurance that would pay out if borrowers didn't - that AIG had sold to a number of large banks and financial firms. Lawyers say there would have been nothing legally wrong with AIG's negotiating to pay some banks less than others on the CDS insurance they had bought from AIG. In fact, since the CDS contracts insured different bonds...
...rale, which was AIG's largest CDS counterparty, for instance, according to Blackrock was willing to unwind the bond insurance its had bought from AIG on its lowest quality bonds for 90 cents on the dollar, or for 10% less than what AIG had originally promised to pay. About 30% of the $16.4 billion in CDS contracts that SocGen had bought from AIG were on bonds rated BBB or worse. A 10% discount on those contracts would have saved AIG $475 million...
...strike even more generous deals. UBS initially told AIG that it would take collateral worth 35% less than what the insurer owned on 55% of the $4.3 billion in CDS contracts it had sold to the Swiss bank. For the remaining 45%, UBS was willing to allow AIG to pay 10% less than what it had originally promised. Those deals would have saved AIG about $1 billion. AIG later broke off those negotiations, and as with all of its other counterparties, paid UBS in full. BlackRock, in the report, said Goldman Sachs, French bank Calyon and German financial giant Deutsche...