More Unfathomable Baloney from AIG: "AIG Was Unprepared for Crisis, Former Top Lawyer Says"

[Mike 03]

Excerpt:

March 12 (Bloomberg) -- American International Group Inc. was unprepared for the financial crisis that forced the insurer to accept a $182.3 billion bailout from the U.S. government, the company’s former general counsel said.

AIG didn’t have the “infrastructure to call upon to respond,” Anastasia Kelly said today at a corporate law conference at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington. Because the company was so diverse and global, “there was no one in charge,” she said. Mark Herr, a spokesman for New York- based AIG, declined to comment.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aRXJ.h3tnxOY&pos=2

While this may technically be true, the implication here is that nobody at AIG saw this coming, when leadership at AIG had permitted Joseph Cassano, the financial maestro (and crook) to run the Financial Products unit in Europe with complete impunity.

They sold billions in Credit Default Swaps to tens of thousands of unsuspecting counter-parties.

The proof that AIG knew this was wrong is that despite the fact this was an unimaginably profitable business, they stopped doing it in 2006 or 2007.

I understand that not everything that happened during the financial meltdown was predictable, but for AIG to cry and moan that they had no clue they were taking ENORMOUS, UNJUSTIFIABLE risk in the Financial Products division is pure malarkey.

[MrCoffee]

1. Whatever helps you sleep at night, you soulless fuck.

Not the OP, the AIG attorney

[notesdev]

2. Why aren't we prosecuting Cassano?

Where's Holder? Why not ask the Brits to extradite him from his London hideout?

[gratuitous]

3. I get the inference

But I'm sure that AIG had no intention of being the loser at the end of the line who takes it in the shorts. They knew full well what sort of confidence game they were playing, and they knew it was going to fall apart eventually, and could fall apart at any time. They were just unprepared to be holding so much of the shit from Big Shitpile. The only reason AIG got hammered and, say, Chase didn't, was merely a matter of timing. Two weeks later and it could have been someone else getting clobbered.

[On the Road]

4. I'm Sure That the London Office Knew it Was Wrong,

but it seems pretty inarguable to say that the company wasn't prepared for it to go south.

[Hannah Bell]

5. Eli Broad, who funds the destruction of the public schools, runs part of aig.

"Eli Broad, as in Ed in '08, the Broad Foundation, and the Broad Prize, played a big role in the collapse of AIG. But he, along with venture philanthropist Bill Gates, might still be the most powerful force currently pushing the so-called business model on public schools.

Broad helped negotiate some of the biggest pay and severance packages for failed AIG CEOs, in history. This should give educators plenty of food for thought about the hypocrisy of the Broad/Gates push for merit pay as part of business-model reform. If merit pay is so great, why didn't it begin with AIG?

The AIG collapse may also cause school boards to think twice about the top-down leadership model being pushed at Broad's own Superintendent's Academy, which offers special fellowships for military officers interested in running school districts. We all should consider the unwarranted influence these giant venture philanthropists are having over public education in general.

Broad co-founded Kaufman & Broad and later acquired Sun Life Insurance (renamed SunAmerica) in 1971 and sold the company to investment bank AIG in 1998 for $18 billion. Instead of retiring on his billions, Broad saw an opportunity to make billions more in the retirement business as millions of the baby-boom generation approached retirement age. As a director of AIG Retirement (VALIC), he was able to keep one foot in real estate and one foot in retirement—two legs planted deep into the sub-prime mortgage scandal."

http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2008/09/eli-broad-st...



apparently he thinks schools should be "accountable" (i.e. teachers should be fired & public infrastructure taken over by corporations)....


but business should be bailed out with taxpayer money.