The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by [Treasury Secretary] Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc.^[1] and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm.  The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008.  The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Why was this extraordinarily generous 100-cents-on-the-dollar backdoor bailout offered to banks like Goldman Sachs?  To the extent you’re bailing them out -- why not something that makes a lot more sense like 60 cents on the dollar?  Why so generous -- careless -- with taxpayer money?

Is it necessary that Goldman Sachs not even take a haircut -- not even lose some profitability or the ability to pay huge bonuses -- for a year or two?

No.  Or at least it doesn’t seem so to me.  Even if I accept that some bailing out is necessary or prudent, what the hell is this crap with the full-on 100-cents-on-the-dollar complete immunization of Goldman Sachs against its extraordinarily bad decisions, all on the taxpayer dime?

Well, you can maybe see why Geithner demanded this be illegally withheld from the public, from stockholders, for example, who had a legal right to an accurate accounting of where AIG’s money was coming from and where it was going.  If you make it known to them, the public is informed, and then people start to get very annoyed that Goldman Sachs and other mega-banks aren’t even being asked to take a 30% haircut on one portion of their accounts.

And that the American taxpayer, meanwhile, is being shellacked for the full cost of this.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 21:56:03 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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