Intermarkets' Privacy Policy
Support


Donate to Ace of Spades HQ!



Recent Entries
Absent Friends
Bandersnatch 2024
GnuBreed 2024
Captain Hate 2023
moon_over_vermont 2023
westminsterdogshow 2023
Ann Wilson(Empire1) 2022
Dave In Texas 2022
Jesse in D.C. 2022
OregonMuse 2022
redc1c4 2021
Tami 2021
Chavez the Hugo 2020
Ibguy 2020
Rickl 2019
Joffen 2014
AoSHQ Writers Group
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published. Contact OrangeEnt for info:
maildrop62 at proton dot me
Cutting The Cord And Email Security
Moron Meet-Ups






















« Administration Seems to Be Settling on Fall Guy for Christmas Bombing Lapse, and, Shocker of Shockers, It's a Bush Appointee | Main | Crochety Old Pinko Jack Cafferty: Hey, Obama Just Flat-Out Lied About Broadcasting Health Care Negotiations; "Just Another Lie Told for Public Expediency;" "Not Even a Token Effort Keep Campaign Promises" »
January 07, 2010

Oh My: Geithner Told AIG to Lie to Public About "Backdoor Bailout" of Big Banks and Investment Houses Through AIG

The government was trying to bail out AIG, to keep the mega-insurer from going down, which could (maybe) bring down the financial system for a year or two.

AIG was loaded up with obligations it could not possibly meet. It had insured all those subprime mortgages, figuring that only a fraction of them could go bust at any particular time, which was a gross miscalculation, as it turns out.

They also had a lot of credit-default swaps, which, I'm not going to lie to you, I don't know really what they are. Except you don't want to have a lot of those on your books as the system comes crashing down.

So here is the malfeasance: AIG paid other banks 100 cents on the dollar -- that is, full freight -- for their own credit default swaps, which were now either worthless or worth pennies on the dollar.

Why would AIG do this? Why would it put out good, hard cash to get back virtually worthless paper? And why in the hell would you want to saddle a company which was already insolvent with even more insolvency-creating bad paper? All the while pumping its cash (cash from the government, of course) right out the door?

Well, the government -- or more specifically, Tim Geithner -- seems to have instructed them to do so as a requirement for continuing government assistance. And he instructed them not to disclose such 100-cents-on-the-dollar swaps to the public.

Here's my possibly naive belief: In this sort of situation, you want the bad paper spread out among as many actors as possible. That way everyone takes a loss -- takes a haircut -- but it's not necessarily anything that most companies can't bear, that will put them under. It just might give them a few lean years. But the system -- the thing we're trying to keep intact -- continues on, bruised and battered but still alive.

So why was all this bad paper being sucked into one company? Well, that one company was The Big One as far as bailouts, and it was the one the government was acknowledging trying to save.

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.

This was kept illegally secret from the public because the public would never have blessed it had they known about it. Actually, the public never really blessed any kind of financial sector bailout, but they seemed to accept, reluctantly, the version of it they were sold on; but they never, in a thousand years, would have accepted this grotesquery had it been revealed to them.

So, here is the story:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by 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. 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.

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.” President Barack Obama selected Geithner as Treasury secretary, a post he took last year.

As you know, I'm not a conspiracy-type guy, but this is, in fact, a conspiracy.

As they say, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity; those on the inside of the profession, of course, always have a conspiracy of shared interest in advancing their own collective cause against every one else's interest. Geithner -- and maybe his boss, Bernacke; who knows about him -- seems to have joined this conspiracy gladly and made sure his friends, and his likely future employers, did not, as the rest of America was expected to do, suffer at all for these catastrophically bad decisions.

Perhaps there's a good, sensible explanation for all this besides just keeping Goldman Sachs in the black, black, black (and pumping out millions of your money in undeserved bonsues).

Maybe I could even be persuaded, had I heard the explanation.

But I never did hear it. They just kept it illegally secret from me. Because the easiest way to "explain" a sketchy action is just to keep it secret from the person to whom an explanation is due. Ask any cheating spouse about that -- it's a no-brainer.

Just to Reiterate: Let's say I accept I want to keep these companies solvent.

Does that mean I want to keep them profitable? As profitable as ever?

No, I don't. Put aside moral considerations -- in pure economic terms, I want them to suffer, to keep them from doing this again, to keep them honest, as it were, and to keep them from thinking I'll always be there to write them a check if they risk too much.

Their profits are private; their losses are socialized. What?

A lot of people are losing money in this recession. A lot of companies have gone under; many are just barely keeping their doors open.

Why in the hell are the people most responsible for this disaster being immunized completely from their catastrophically bad decisions? Why are those harmed by their decisions being asked -- did I say asked? No asking was involved; they just did it secretly -- to subsidize those who caused all the problems?

Goldman Sachs and all the others should have had at least three years of losses and at least three years without bonuses. At least. Keep them from going under completely I understand.

Keep them from even having a year of losses? No, sorry, I don't understand that.

Which is why, I suppose, Geithner kept this secret from me.

Thanks to AHFF Geoff.

Counter-Argument: Spongeworthy sends this post by Megan McArdle, making (or at least stating) the case that Goldman Sachs didn't have to agree to any haircut at all, and could have just pushed to get 100% reimbursement.

Okay, I have duly linked that. I do not, however, believe it. If you know that pushing your claims 100% will drive a firm under (and you might wind up getting very little out of it), you don't push your claims 100%.

Sponge -- and I think Holdfast too -- are saying that the government had no leverage because it was known that they wouldn't let AIG go into bankruptcy under any scenario, so they couldn't get tough with Goldman et al.

Eh. I don't know. These guys sure seemed to be able to boss companies around. If I'm remembering right, there was also some chicanery like this involving another bank.


digg this
posted by Ace at 02:45 PM

| Access Comments




Recent Comments
buddhaha: "Holding her like a bowling ball? I'll see myself ..."

Sebastian Melmoth: "If you are a Republican who voted for Austin then ..."

[/i][/b]andycanuck (hovnC)[/s][/u]: "Earlier today (Tuesday), the IAF conducted an inte ..."

Alberta Oil Peon: "Is Graham considering voting to reject him? Poste ..."

Mister Ghost: "Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh JUST IN: Senator Lind ..."

Sebastian Melmoth: "The prosecution proved the glove was OJs beyond a ..."

guzano: "TX Gov. Abbott bussing all those migrants to New Y ..."

Tonypete: "OSINTdefender @sentdefender 4h Israeli Defense Mi ..."

JackStraw: ">>Colorado Officials Persecuting Tina Peters Worke ..."

[/i][/b]andycanuck (hovnC)[/s][/u]: "Taking a page from PDT: OSINTdefender @sentdefe ..."

Sebastian Melmoth: "I think The Good , the Bad and the Ugly is the wor ..."

[/i][/b]andycanuck (hovnC)[/s][/u]: "Africa beats you with all those universities that ..."

Recent Entries
Search


Polls! Polls! Polls!
Frequently Asked Questions
The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick
Top Top Tens
Greatest Hitjobs

The Ace of Spades HQ Sex-for-Money Skankathon
A D&D Guide to the Democratic Candidates
Margaret Cho: Just Not Funny
More Margaret Cho Abuse
Margaret Cho: Still Not Funny
Iraqi Prisoner Claims He Was Raped... By Woman
Wonkette Announces "Morning Zoo" Format
John Kerry's "Plan" Causes Surrender of Moqtada al-Sadr's Militia
World Muslim Leaders Apologize for Nick Berg's Beheading
Michael Moore Goes on Lunchtime Manhattan Death-Spree
Milestone: Oliver Willis Posts 400th "Fake News Article" Referencing Britney Spears
Liberal Economists Rue a "New Decade of Greed"
Artificial Insouciance: Maureen Dowd's Word Processor Revolts Against Her Numbing Imbecility
Intelligence Officials Eye Blogs for Tips
They Done Found Us Out, Cletus: Intrepid Internet Detective Figures Out Our Master Plan
Shock: Josh Marshall Almost Mentions Sarin Discovery in Iraq
Leather-Clad Biker Freaks Terrorize Australian Town
When Clinton Was President, Torture Was Cool
What Wonkette Means When She Explains What Tina Brown Means
Wonkette's Stand-Up Act
Wankette HQ Gay-Rumors Du Jour
Here's What's Bugging Me: Goose and Slider
My Own Micah Wright Style Confession of Dishonesty
Outraged "Conservatives" React to the FMA
An On-Line Impression of Dennis Miller Having Sex with a Kodiak Bear
The Story the Rightwing Media Refuses to Report!
Our Lunch with David "Glengarry Glen Ross" Mamet
The House of Love: Paul Krugman
A Michael Moore Mystery (TM)
The Dowd-O-Matic!
Liberal Consistency and Other Myths
Kepler's Laws of Liberal Media Bias
John Kerry-- The Splunge! Candidate
"Divisive" Politics & "Attacks on Patriotism" (very long)
The Donkey ("The Raven" parody)
Powered by
Movable Type 2.64