Aig Insurance Quotes

The “consumer loan” piles that Wall Street firms, led by Goldman Sachs, asked AIG FP to insure went from being 2 percent subprime mortgages to being 95 percent subprime mortgages. In a matter of months, AIG FP, in effect, bought $50 billion in triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds by insuring them against default.

When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default swaps in $100 million chunks, Burry guessed, rightly, that Goldman wasn’t ultimately on the other side of his bets. Goldman would never be so stupid as to make huge naked bets that millions of insolvent Americans would repay their home loans. He didn’t know who, or why, or how much, but he knew that some giant corporate entity with a triple-A rating was out there selling credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG—American International Group, Inc.

default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG—American International Group, Inc. Or, rather, a unit of AIG called AIG FP. AIG Financial Products was created

banks—the biggest of which was the $13.9 billion AIG owed to Goldman Sachs. When you added in the $8.4 billion in cash AIG had already forked over to Goldman in collateral, you saw that Goldman had transferred more than $20 billion in subprime mortgage bond risk into the insurance company, which was in one way or another being covered by the U.S. taxpayer. That fact alone was enough to make everyone wonder at once how much more of this stuff was out there, and who owned it.

first. In a financial system that was rapidly generating complicated risks, AIG FP became a huge swallower of those risks. In the early days it must have seemed as if it was being paid to insure events extremely unlikely to occur, as it was. Its success bred imitators: Zurich Re FP, Swiss Re FP, Credit Suisse FP, Gen Re FP. (“Re” stands for Reinsurance.) All of these places were central to what happened in the last two decades; without them, the new risks being created would have had no place to hide and would have remained in full view of bank regulators. All of these places, when the crisis came, would be washed away by the general nausea felt in the presence of complicated financial risks, but there was a moment when their existence seemed cartographically necessary to the financial world. AIG FP was the model for them all.

There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry’s purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars’ worth of bonds. He’d either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he’d insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn’t own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to “insure” it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn’t insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market—and this was the second way to think about it.

Goldman Sachs itself—and so Goldman was in the position of selling bonds to its customers created by its own traders, so they might bet against them. Secondly, there was a crude, messy, slow, but acceptable substitute for Mike Burry’s credit default swaps: the actual cash bonds. According to a former Goldman derivatives trader, Goldman would buy the triple-A tranche of some CDO, pair it off with the credit default swaps AIG sold Goldman that insured the tranche (at a cost well below the yield on the tranche), declare the entire package risk-free, and hold it off its balance sheet. Of course, the whole thing wasn’t risk-free: If AIG went bust, the insurance was worthless, and Goldman could lose everything. Today Goldman Sachs is, to put it mildly, unhelpful when asked to explain exactly what it did, and this lack of transparency extends to its own shareholders. “If a team of forensic accountants went over Goldman’s books, they’d be shocked at just how good Goldman is at hiding things,

Goldman started buying up protection in the form of credit default swaps—insurance—against the possibility that AIG would fail.

On Monday, Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy, and Merrill Lynch, having announced $55.2 billion in losses on subprime bond–backed CDOs, had sold itself to Bank of America. The U.S. stock market had fallen by more than it had since the first day of trading after the attack on the World Trade Center. On Tuesday the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it had lent $85 billion to the insurance company AIG, to pay off the losses on the subprime credit default swaps AIG had sold to Wall Street banks—the biggest of which was the $13.9 billion AIG owed to Goldman Sachs. When you added in the $8.4 billion in cash AIG had already forked over to Goldman in collateral, you saw that Goldman had transferred more than $20 billion in subprime mortgage bond risk into the insurance company, which was in one way or another being covered by the U.S. taxpayer.

In 2007 one of its biggest clients, Goldman Sachs, demanded that AIG put up billions of dollars more in collateral as required under its swaps contracts. AIG disclosed the existence of the collateral dispute in November. At the December conference, Charles Gates, a longtime insurance analyst for Credit Suisse, asked pointedly what it meant that “your assessment of certain super-senior credit default swaps and the related collateral . . . differs significantly from your counterparties.

In a futile gesture against the overwhelming consensus, I did call a New York Times editor to complain about a damaging story portraying the AIG rescue as a backdoor bailout for Hank’s former colleagues at Goldman Sachs. I had asked Lloyd Blankfein about Goldman’s direct exposure to AIG; when he assured me Goldman’s exposures were relatively small and fully hedged, I made him send me the documentation. Still, the Times wouldn’t correct the record, and my call probably strengthened its suspicions. The same reporter later did a story portraying the entire crisis response team as servants of Goldman, accompanied by a vampire squid–like diagram with me in the middle. In the media, in the public, even in the financial community, we faced withering skepticism about our motives as well as our competence. After all, we had lent a mismanaged insurance company three years’ worth of federal spending on basic scientific research.

would the Volcker amendment, had it been law in 2007, have prevented the 2008 financial crisis? The financial crisis was caused by the overleveraging of real estate-related securities in Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which were investment banks and would not have fallen under the purview of the Volcker amendment. Nor would it have applied to the insurance giant AIG, which the Fed chose to save after seeing the turmoil unleashed by the Lehman bankruptcy. Furthermore, banks that obtained loans from the Fed, specifically Citibank and Bank of America, ran into trouble because of bad real estate loans, not proprietary trading. Given this history, it is dubious that the Volcker amendment, had it been in effect in 2007, would have changed the course of the financial crisis.

As the world economy grows, and as the super-elite, in particular, get richer, the superstars who work for the super-rich can charge super fees. Consider the 2009 legal showdown between Hank Greenberg and AIG, the insurance giant he had built. It was a high-stakes battle, as AIG accused Greenberg, through a privately held company, Starr International, of misappropriating $4.3 billion worth of assets. For his defense, Greenberg hired David Boies. With his trademark slightly ratty Lands’ End suits (ordered a dozen at a time by his office online), his midwestern background, his proud affection for Middle American pastimes like craps, and his severe dyslexia (he didn’t learn how to read until he was in the third grade), Boies comes across as neither a superstar nor a member of the super-elite. But he is both. Boies and his eponymous firm earned a reputed $100 million for the nine-month job of defending Greenberg. That was one of the richest fees earned in a single litigation. Yet, for Greenberg, it was a terrific deal. When you have $4.3 billion at risk, $100 million—only 2.3 percent of the total—just isn’t that much money. (Further sweetening the transaction was the judge’s eventual ruling that AIG, then nearly 80 percent owned by the U.S. government, was liable for up to $150 million of Greenberg’s legal fees, but he didn’t know that when he retained Boies.) It

AIG was looking worse and worse. It had a trillion-dollar balance sheet, 115,000 employees, and a slew of solid insurance businesses. But a hedge fund-like subsidiary called AIG Financial Products had put its franchise at risk, selling insurance against the risk of a housing slump. It had exploited the strength of AIG’s traditional businesses and AAA credit ratings