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Friday, October 24, 2008

How do you blow through $123 billion in a month?
Posted by Jill | 5:54 AM
What is it about the financial profligacy of Republicans? You have a Republican vice-presidential nominee who in a month managed to snag designer clothing worth more than many Americans -- including plumbers from Ohio -- will earn in three years. We all know about the staggering debt into which Republicans have plunged us for the last eight years. And now AIG, which is the beneficiary of a massive taxpayer bailout, has used up three quarters of the Federal loan it was given already -- and there is no guarantee that it will be enough to keep the company afloat.

Of course the first thing that comes to mind when considering AIG is the junkets at luxury resorts that the company still provided to its top sales reps. But this week New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo put the kibosh on a fat golden parachute for the company's CEO and $600 million in year-end bonuses.

And still -- it may not be enough:
AIG has borrowed $90.3 billion from the Federal Reserve's credit line as of yesterday, the bulk of it to pay off bad bets the company made in guaranteeing other firms' risky mortgage investments. That's up from roughly $83 billion AIG had borrowed a week ago, and the $68 billion level it reached a week before that. The news comes as the company's new chief executive warned Wednesday that the government's financial lifeline may not be enough to keep AIG afloat.

The high volume of taxpayer funds that the trillion-dollar corporation tapped within five weeks also has others fretting that the largest government bailout in history may still not be adequate. AIG began reporting unusual multimillion-dollar losses this spring as a result of its heavy exposure to risky mortgages, and the U.S. Treasury decided that its failure would probably bring down several other major investment firms and banks whose fortunes were tied to AIG.

But Wall Street analysts said this is a vulnerable juncture for the insurance giant. It's now in a deep trough -- from which it may either emerge leaner and meaner or never return.

"It can't be good that they have to pay out so much more money, " said insurance analyst David Schiff of Schiff's Insurance Observer. "They're obviously in a lousy spot."


Imagine if AIG fails -- AFTER it put American taxpayers even further into debt. What does that tell us? What does it tell us when all the "Joes" the McCain campaign talks about but for whom it does nothing are allowed to lose their jobs, their homes, their retirement money, their futures, and are told "Sorry, dude, but there's no money for you and American businesses have to be able to send your job overseas in order to be competitive" -- but for companies like AIG, the federal coffers are always open, no questions asked. We all know about the concept of "too big to fail", but what happens when "too big to fail" fails anyway?

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Anonymous Anonymous said...
Now tie the credit default swaps to Alan Greenspan's "who'da thunk it" excuse yesterday... that's why AIG is in trouble, not the mortgages themselves, the credit default swaps that no one really understood or kept track of very well and that Greenspan didn't want regulated...
PurpleGirl
10/24/08, 12:01 PM  
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