Tag: aig

Nationalization Works

By James Kwak

The Treasury Department today announced that it has sold off the rest of its stake in A.I.G. Treasury will focus on the claim that taxpayers made a profit on the deal. As I’ve written before, the story is a bit more complicated.

But that’s a sideshow. The point of nationalizing A.I.G. (what else do you call it when the government buys 80% of a company?) wasn’t to make money; it was supposedly to save the global economy. In any case, things have worked out pretty well: the global economy is intact, though still not healthy, and A.I.G. is a private company again.

Which brings up what, to me, is the bigger question: Why were we so afraid of nationalizing Citigroup and Bank of America four years ago? And isn’t A.I.G. looking like a better company today than those two?

The Next Subpoena For Goldman Sachs

Yesterday’s release of detailed information regarding with whom AIG settled in full on credit default swaps (CDS) at the end of 2008 was helpful.  We learned a great deal about the precise nature of transactions and the exact composition of counterparties involved.

We already knew, of course, that this “close out” at full price was partly about Goldman Sachs – and that SocGen was involved.  There was also, it turns out, some Merrill Lynch exposure (affecting Bank of America, which was in the process of buying Merrill).  Still, it’s striking that no other major banks had apparently much of this kind of insurance from AIG against their losses – Citi, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan, for example, are not on the list.

This information is useful because it will help the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee structure a follow up subpeona to be served on Goldman Sachs with the following purpose: Continue reading “The Next Subpoena For Goldman Sachs” →

More on Goldman and AIG

Thomas Adams, a lawyer and former bond insurer executive, wrote a guest post for naked capitalism on the question of why AIG was bailed out and the monoline bond insurers were not (wow, is it really almost two years since the monoline insurer crisis?). He estimates that the monolines together had roughly the same amount of exposure to CDOs that AIG did; in addition, since the monolines also insured trillions of dollars of municipal debt, there were potential spillover effects. (AIG, by contrast, insured tens of trillions of non-financial stuff — people’s lives, houses, cars, commercial liability, etc. — but that was in separately capitalized subsidiaries.)

The difference between the monolines and AIG, Adams posits, was Goldman Sachs.

Continue reading “More on Goldman and AIG” →

The AIG-Maiden Lane III Controversy

As everyone knows by now, Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for TARP, has a new report out on the decision by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last Fall to make various AIG counterparties (primarily some very big banks with names you know) whole on the the CDS protection they had bought from AIG to cover their risk on some CDOs. The potentially juicy bit has to do with the Maiden Lane III transaction (New York Fed summary here).

Continue reading “The AIG-Maiden Lane III Controversy” →

Obama, the Light Touch?

Edmund L. Andrews and David E. Sanger have an article in The New York Times today that is sure to infuriate some people, including me. Here’s one excerpt:

“Far from eagerly micromanaging the companies the government owns, Mr. Obama and his economic team have often labored mightily to avoid exercising control even when government money was the only thing keeping some companies afloat.

“A few weeks ago, there were anguished grimaces inside the Treasury Department as the new chief executive of A.I.G., Robert H. Benmosche, whose roughly $9 million pay package is 22 times greater than Mr. Obama’s, ridiculed officials in Washington — his majority shareholders — as ‘crazies.’

“Causing even more unease to policymakers, Mr. Benmosche insisted that A.I.G. — one of the worst offenders in the risk-taking that sent the nation over the edge last year — would not rush to sell its businesses at fire-sale prices, despite pressure from Fed and Treasury officials, who are desperate to have the insurer repay its $180 billion government bailout.

“But in the end, according to one senior official, ‘no one called him and told him to shut up,’ and no one has pulled rank and told him to sell assets as soon as possible to repay the loans.

“A similar hands-off decision was made about the auto companies. Shortly after General Motors and Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy, some members of the administration’s auto task force argued that the group should not go out of business until it was confident that a new management team in Detroit had a handle on what needed to be done.

“But Mr. Summers strongly rejected that approach, and the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, agreed.

“‘The argument was that if the president said he wasn’t elected to run G.M., then we couldn’t hire a new board and then try to run any aspect of it,’ one participant in the discussions said. The auto task force took off for summer vacation in July, and it never returned.”

The political argument for this position makes sense. Basically, Obama and his administration are afraid of being charged with “socialism” or “big government,” so they are doing what they can to defuse this charge. (Not that that will help given the way political rhetoric is thrown around these days.)

Continue reading “Obama, the Light Touch?” →

The Man Who Crashed the World?

Back in November, Michael Lewis wrote a great story in Portfolio on the financial crisis, focusing on the traders who saw that the housing bubble was going to crash, bringing mortgage-backed securities down with it – and made lots of money betting on it. Now Lewis is back with his article in Vanity Fair on AIG Financial Products (FP) and its last head, Joseph Cassano. This time, though, it feels like it’s missing the usual Lewis magic.

Lewis sets out to tell the untold story of FP, based on extensive interviews with people who actually worked there. He starts by laying out the conventional wisdom about FP, which presumably he is going to debunk. The conventional wisdom, according to Lewis, is that the problem lay in credit default swaps: “The public explanation of A.I.G.’s failure focused on the credit-default swaps sold by traders at A.I.G. F.P., when A.I.G.’s problems were clearly much broader.” Indeed, Lewis implies that the government essentially framed FP: “Why were officials, both public and private, so intent on leading others to believe all the losses at A.I.G. had been caused by a few dozen traders in this fringe unit in London and Connecticut?

Continue reading “The Man Who Crashed the World?” →

The Department Of Justice Is On Line Two

I don’t generally overreact to news (from the NYT this morning, on the AIG-Goldman connection that runs through Edward Liddy’s stock ownership), but this has gone far enough. 

Have we completely lost of sense of what is and is not a conflict of interest?  Have we really built a system in which greed fully overshadows responsibility?  Is it not time for a complete rethink of what constitutes acceptable executive behavior?

One of our country’s leading corporate attorneys made a telling point to me on Wednesday night, “the only way to control executive behavior is to criminalize it,” i.e., civil penalties do not change behavior – the prospect of jail time has to be on the table.  His broader point was that antitrust action can make a difference in today’s world, but only if this includes potential criminal charges. Continue reading “The Department Of Justice Is On Line Two” →

Economics, Politics, Outrage, and the Media

Warning: This is a post about economics and politics; it is a reader response post; but (here’s the warning), it’s also one of those annoying self-referential posts you only see on the Internet discussing a debate among the commentariat.

Last week went something like this:

  1. We learned about the $165 million in retention bonuses at AIG Financial Products.
  2. A lot of people, up to and including President Obama, got mad.
  3. Various commentators, including Ian Bremmer (on Planet Money, around the 14-minute mark) and Joe Nocera, said, in Nocera’s words, “Can we all just calm down a little?”

Their argument is basically that $165 million is small change, the government should be working on bigger issues, and the demonization of AIG is making it harder to solve the real problems.

Continue reading “Economics, Politics, Outrage, and the Media” →

Why Bail Out AIG’s Creditors?

Simon and I wrote on op-ed in the New York Times today, trying to debunk the idea that, as we put it, “A.I.G.’s traders are the people that we must depend on to save the United States economy.” The AIG bonus fiasco, as I’ve written earlier, has been particularly useful in raising the political cost of the administration’s current bailout strategy. But, as I said then, “$165 million, of course, is less than one-tenth of one percent of the total amount of bailout money given to AIG in one form or another.” And as far as the cost to the taxpayer is concerned, the big bill is for bailing out AIG’s creditors. In his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, Lucian Bebchuk wants to know why.

Now, the government has not explicitly guaranteed AIG’s liabilities. But the main reason for bailing out AIG in the first place was the fear that an uncontrolled failure would have ripple effects that would take down many other financial institutions who were dependent in some way on AIG; most commonly, they had bought insurance, in the form of credit default swaps, from AIG and were counting on being paid. And a major usage of bailout money has been to make whole AIG’s counterparties holding those credit default swaps, primarily investment banks trading on their own account or on behalf of their hedge fund customers.

Continue reading “Why Bail Out AIG’s Creditors?” →

Political Will: Bernanke On The True Cost Of Banking

Stabilization programs in emerging markets often come down to this: the government needs to do something unpopular, e.g., reduce some subsidies, privatize an industry, or eliminate the crazy credit that goes to oligarchs – no one likes oligarchs, but their factories employ a lot of people.  There is naturally resistance – pushback from legislators, riots in the streets, or oligarchs calling their friends in the US foreign policy establishment.  The question becomes: does the government have the “political will” to get the job done?

In fall 1997, a key issue for Indonesia’s IMF program was whether the government could close the banking operations belonging to one of President Suharto’s sons.  There was an epic and fascinating struggle and, in the end, the government did not have sufficient political will or power.  The subsequent loss of US support, and further currency and economic collapse is (messy and painful for many) history.

It is striking that Ben Bernanke now asks whether the United States today has sufficient political will. Continue reading “Political Will: Bernanke On The True Cost Of Banking” →

Regulatory Arbitrage in Action

From the Washington Post:

[Scott] Polakoff [acting director of the Office of Thrift Supervision] acknowledged that his agency technically was charged with overseeing AIG and its troublesome Financial Products unit. AIG bought a savings and loan in 1999, and subsequently was able to select the OTS its primary regulator. But that left the small agency with the enormous job of overseeing a sprawling company that operated in 130 countries.

Is there another side to this story or is it really as simple as that?

Update: ProPublica had a good story on this back in November. Here’s one short excerpt:

Examiners mostly concurred with the company’s repeated assurances that any risk in the swaps portfolio was manageable. They went along in part because of AIG’s huge capital base . . . and because securities underlying the swaps had top credit ratings.

AIG in Review

Well, it’s done. AIG is getting another bailout.

I have to admit I don’t fully understand the ongoing AIG bailout saga, so I thought I would do a little research to try to figure out what is going on. I thought I would just look up all the term sheets, but I found it’s harder to get that kind of information from the Federal Reserve web site than from the Treasury web site. For example, the original September 16 press release doesn’t say what the terms of the 79.9% equity interest are, and I still haven’t been able to figure that out. If you know the details, let me know and I’ll update this post. In any case, I think this is the best single-page overview you’ll find on the web.

Continue reading “AIG in Review” →

The Overpayment Begins

Way back in the heady days of September, we criticized the original version of TARP because it seemed designed to ensure the government would overpay for toxic assets. Instead, we recommended splitting the transaction into two parts: (a) buy the assets at market (cheap) prices, and (b) explicitly recapitalize the banks. In mid-October, Treasury committed $250 billion to explicit recapitalization, but to all intents and purposes seems committed to using some of the other $450 billion to buy those same toxic assets – at what price is still unclear. (Why they would still bother doing this is also unclear, for that matter.)

Until now.

Today’s government re-re-bailout of AIG (WSJ article; Yves Smith commentary) can be hard to follow, but one provision is the creation of a new entity with $5 billion from AIG and $30 billion from the government to buy collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). The goal is to buy CDOs that AIG insured (using credit default swaps), because if those CDOs are held by an entity that is friendly to AIG, that entity will no longer demand collateral from AIG. The theory is that in the long run these CDOs will not default and that the new entity will make money on the deal.

The rub is that this entity is planning to pay 50 cents on the dollar for these CDOs. This has two problems. First, 50 cents is almost certainly more than these CDOs are worth on their own (hence the title of this post). If they were really worth 50 cents on the dollar, AIG wouldn’t be having the problems it is having posting collateral; like the original TARP plan, this is an unfounded bet that the market is mispricing these assets. Second, and more bafflingly, the CDS contract is presumably separate from the ownership of the CDO; that is, buying the CDO from the counterparty doesn’t eliminate AIG’s obligation to pay if the CDO defaults, and hence doesn’t serve its stated purpose. If, on the contrary, the CDS contract is contingent on the counterparty holding the CDO, then the CDO is worth a lot more than 50 cents to the counterparty, because it is insured for 100 cents by AIG – and we all know the government isn’t going to let AIG default on those swaps. And no sane counterparty would sell for 50 cents.

Supposedly Treasury had enough time to think about how AIG should be bailed out and this is a better bailout than the original. If it is, I must be missing something.