Eight years ago this month the global financial system seemed on the verge of collapse, and its rescue led to the greatest depredation on the public purse in American history. There were many crucial events during the month of the long knives, but no corporation was more central to the mess than AIG.
On Sept. 7, 2008, the federal government took control of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and injected $100 billion to ensure the troubled mortgage lenders could pay their debts. On September 15, Lehman Brothers announced it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch for $50 billion.
Then, in the biggest bank failure in U.S. history, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) seized the assets of Washington Mutual, the sixth largest U.S. bank, and JPMorgan acquired the bank’s deposits, assets, and troubled mortgage portfolio from the FDIC. On Sept. 21, the Federal Reserve approved Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs transition to commercial banks.
While many blamed the investment banks for high leverage, bad risk management and overreliance on faulty internal models, not to be overlooked is the role AIG, the nation’s largest insurance company, played in the crisis. AIG was once one of the largest and most profitable companies in corporate America, with a gold-plated “AAA” credit rating.
But on September 16, the federal government provided an initial $85 billion in taxpayer cash to bail out the firm. In return, AIG became a ward of Uncle Sam, which acquired 79.9 percent ownership of the company. This was only the first of four bailouts for AIG, totaling an estimated $180 billion.
AIG was in worse shape than Lehman Brothers had been. Yet unlike Lehman, the feds chose to save it. The explanation: AIG was regarded as too big, too global, and too interconnected to fail.
After the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall, the law that had regulated financial markets for over six decades, President Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) in 2000, which effectively removed derivatives such as Credit Default Swaps (CDS) from federal and state regulation, proving once again that regulators exist to protect the interests of the regulated.
CDS are essentially a bet on whether a company will default on its bonds and loans. AIG was a huge player in the CDS business, which allowed the firm to insure asset-based securities containing sub-prime mortgages against default.
Although swaps behave similarly to insurance policies, they were not covered by the same regulations as insurance after passage of the CFMA. When an insurance company sells a policy, it is required to set aside a reserve in case of a loss on the insured object. But since credit default swaps were not classified as insurance contracts, there was no such requirement.
AIG’s CDS business caused it serious financial difficulties in 2007, when the housing bubble burst, home values dropped and holders of sub-prime mortgages defaulted on their loans. By selling these contracts without reserves, the firm left itself unprotected if the assets insured by the swaps defaulted. AIG had insured bonds whose repayments were dependent on sub-prime mortgage payments. Yet it never bothered to put money aside to pay claims, leaving the company without sufficient resources to make good on the insurance.
Taxpayers stepped in to pay in full the dozens of banks whose financial products were insured with AIG swaps. Unlike in corporate bankruptcies, none of these counterparties were forced to take a haircut, requiring the government to pump more public money into the banks.
To add insult to injury, two weeks after the government provided its fourth bailout to AIG in 2009, it was revealed that the firm was paying $165 million in bonuses to retain key employees to unwind the toxic financial waste. Most people understand that if you go to government for a handout, executives should forgo bonuses. Then again, so much of what happened eight years ago this month defied common sense.
Originally Published: Sep 16, 2016.
