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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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The Tipping Point?
$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. Yet it may turn out to be the $165 million that broke the...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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