The AIG Bailout, Part 1.

[hay rick]

I am currently reading Neal Barofsky's "Bailout" which recounts his tenure as the Inspector General overseeing TARP. The chapter on the AIG bailout is very enlightening, so I thought I would extract and share some of the highlights.

Barofsky breaks the AIG bailout into two parts. The first part was a $85 billion loan from the New York Fed in exchange for 80% of the stock of AIG. Barofsky continues the story:

A second part of the November deal covered the ongoing payouts required each time AIG was downgraded or the prices of the CDOs covered by AIG's credit default swap contracts plunged lower. Geithner and his team decided to terminate $62.1 billion of AIG's contracts with the banks. The deal had two parts. First, the counterparty banks were paid the approximate market value of the CDOs covered by the credit default swap contracts, about $27.1 billion in cash, which was provided almost entirely by the New York Fed in return for the CDOs themselves. For the second part of the deal, AIG and the New York Fed agreed that the banks could keep all of the previously posted collateral, approximately $35 billion, in return for the banks agreeing to rip up the credit default contracts. As a result, the bleeding of cash was staunched and the taxpayers became the proud owners of a mass of ill-conceived CDOs. For the banks, between the cash that they received from the Fed and the collateral they had previously received from AIG, they had essentially been paid 100 cents on the dollar for $62 billion in CDOs that were actually worth far less than that.

The deal was a gross distortion of the normal functions of the market. In a bailout-free world, instead of being saved by the government, AIG would have been unable to make its cash collateral payments to the banks and gone into bankruptcy. As a result, the banks would have been left with the CDOs and stuck with their continued declines in value. Those losses would have punished the banks for what had been bad and risky bets- i.e., assuming that AIG would be able to meet all its obligations. In market parlance, each of the banks would have borne the "counterparty risk" of doing business with AIG and suffered the consequences of betting on the wrong counterparty. Instead they were paid out in full.

In that respect, Geithner's opening of the spigot of taxpayer cash for AIG was more of a bailout of the banks than it was of AIG itself. The government thereby sent Wall Street a very dangerous message: counterparties who do business with financial institutions whose collapse could have devastating consequences for the entire financial system needn't do due diligence or worry about their counterparty risk. Instead they can rely on the government to bail them out.

That is the crux of the too-big-to-fail problem. The failure of giant financial institutions that are so big and have built up so many obligations to one another could cause a domino effect that could take down other major players and eventually the entire financial system. If the government had not stopped in to save AIG, major banks in the United States and Europe would have potentially suffered tens of billions of dollars in losses at a time when neither they nor the system could withstand such a further shock. The government felt it had no choice, and perhaps that was correct, but as long as there are financial institutions of such size and with so many interconnections, future massive crises- and bailouts- are all but inevitable.

Barofsky contrasts the favored treatment of the banks that dealt with AIG with a more typical scenario that played out earlier in 2008 with the bond insurer Ambac and in which counterparties recieved between 28 and 60 cents on the dollar. The problem with too-big-too-fail institutions is that the American people are taken financial hostage. We are involuntary counterparties to Wall Street's transactions, liable for losses without the offsetting benefit of participation in profits.

AIG Bailout, Part 2: http://www.democraticunderground.com/111632332
AIG Bailout, Part 3: http://www.democraticunderground.com/111632331