Aig Quotes

An cinniúnt, is dócha: féach an féileacán úd thall atá ag foluain os cionn mo choinnle. Ní fada go loiscfear a sciatháin mhaiseacha: cá bhfios dúinne nach bhfuil a fhios sin aige, freisin?

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.

Barney Frank wanted to know where the Fed was going to get the $85 billion to lend to AIG. I didn’t think this was the time to explain the mechanics of creating bank reserves. I said, “We have $800 billion,” referring to the pre-crisis size of the Fed’s balance sheet. Barney looked stunned. He didn’t see why the Fed should have that kind of money at its disposal.

Fat cells want to be downsized about as much as General Motors or AIG.

It may be satisfying to castigate the likes of Geithner and the heads of Lehman Brothers and AIG, but safety experts like Perrow know it is far more productive to design better systems than to hope for better people.

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.

Why, for example, wasn’t AIG required to reserve capital against them? Why, for that matter, were Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s willing to bless 80 percent of a pool of dicey mortgage loans with the same triple-A rating they bestowed on the debts of the U.S. Treasury? Why didn’t someone, anyone, inside Goldman Sachs stand up and say, “This is obscene. The rating agencies, the ultimate pricers of all these subprime mortgage loans, clearly do not understand the risk, and their idiocy is creating a recipe for catastrophe”?

I do not believe in the power of brand names or in emulating any of the brand name investors out there. It is a fact that all—if not at least most—of the biggest names in American finance and industry out there today have proven after the 2008 crisis to be some of the most incompetent people there are. Starting with the untouchable Goldman Sachs, who was bailed out by over $5 billion from Warren Buffett, to AIG and Citibank, who were bailed out by the hundreds of billions of dollars from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), having a name and a history does not make you the brightest and the best. All it takes is one nincompoop with a huge ego or a board of directors who think they are smarter than everyone else to destroy what has taken generations to build.

Not a single high-level CEO has even been charged in connection with the financial collapse, much less been convicted and sent to prison, and most of them went on to receive huge year-end bonuses. Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products—known as “Mr. Credit-Default Swap”—led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees—including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment.

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.

This is part of the reason that the AIG bailout is so troubling: when at least $13 billion worth of taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, some of that money was doubtless going to cover the bets Goldman had made against the stuff the bank itself was selling to old people and cities and states. In other words, Goldman made out on the housing bubble twice: it fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.

And what should he have known? Well, who could answer that? Thought he was closer to all the players than anyone, he still couldn't identify who was responsible and who wasn't. Really responsible, not just "look the other way" responsible. They all were, in some larger sense. And yet, while he knew this was a wholly indefensible position, he felt that somehow none of them were, either. Just like the guys at Lehmen, or Bear Stearns, or AIG. Just like the guys at Delphic. It became a game, a contest; the only rules that governed were what made you money and what didn't. All Paul did was hang the hell on and try not to get thrown.

Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products—known as “Mr. Credit-Default Swap”—led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees—including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment. Neither

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.

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,

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.

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.

I knew we’d be accused of rewarding incompetence, of throwing public money down a rat hole. But I believed we had gotten taxpayers a reasonable deal, not just in the financial terms of the loan, but by avoiding even more severe damage to the economy. I’d soon get some early validation of that when Hank Greenberg, AIG’s hard-driving former chief executive and a major shareholder in the firm, visited me to complain that the Fed had been given too much equity in AIG, too much of the upside. I was a bit shocked by the audacity; basically, he wanted us to give back a big chunk of the company. I told him we hadn’t done the deal to make money, and we’d be happy to sell him back some of the equity if he’d be willing to take some of the risk. But what interested me was Greenberg’s confidence that we’d get a positive return from AIG, rather than the tens of billions in losses that everyone else seemed to expect. He’d be right about that, but only because of the force of the government’s actions to stabilize the company and the broader financial system over the next few years. He and other AIG shareholders would end up suing the federal government, claiming that we had been unjustly harsh to the firm we rescued.

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.

THE NEXT day, the President and I announced a new small business lending initiative in the East Room. After I laid out the details in my usual colorless fashion, the President said he wanted to take a moment to discuss his outrage about the AIG bonuses. “I’ve asked Secretary Geithner to use [our] leverage and pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole,” he said. “I want everybody to be clear that Secretary Geithner has been on the case.” I read a draft of those remarks the morning of the event, and I wasn’t pleased. We didn’t think we could claw back the bonuses that had already been obligated, and even if we could modestly reduce future payouts, raising public expectations seemed unwise. I thought the President should stay as far away from the issue as possible. I didn’t see the need to remind everyone that I was “on the case,” either. But the country

committed more money to AIG than the federal government had spent on Social Security and Medicare.

everyone benefited from our decision to prevent AIG’s failure, not just the millions of families and businesses around the world with AIG policies, but everyone with a job, a house, or some savings to lose. That’s why we did what we did.

AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary (AIG FP), where its mammoth CDS business was housed, managed to get itself regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) because the corporate parent company had acquired a few small savings banks. Savings banks? Aren’t those the stodgy thrift institutions on the corner that take savings deposits and grant mortgages to homeowners? Seems like a funny place to lodge one of the world’s largest derivatives operations. Well, AIG FP was not actually lodged there, but merely lodged there for regulatory purposes. Call it skillful regulatory shopping.

Of the twenty-five largest financial institutions at the start of 2008, thirteen either failed (Lehman, WaMu), received government help to avoid failure (Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Citi, BofA), merged to avoid failure (Countrywide, Bear, Merrill, Wachovia), or transformed their business structure to avoid failure (Morgan Stanley, Goldman). The stock market dropped more than 40 percent from its 2007 peak.

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

The pyramidlike structure of a collateralized debt obligation is a beautiful thing—if you are fascinated by the intricacies of financial engineering. A banker creates a CDO by assembling pieces of debt according to their credit ratings and their yields. The mistake made by AIG and others who were lured by them was believing that the ones with the higher credit ratings were such a sure bet that the companies did not bother to set aside much capital against them in the unlikely event that the CDO would generate losses.

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.

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

Nuair a bhagras an nàmhaid, Air a' Ghàidheal a dh'éighear - Bidh gach morair is iarla Guidhe dian leibh gu éirigh, Bidh sibh measail aig diùcan 'S bheir an Crùn a chuid fhéin dhuibh; Ach nuair cheanglar an t-sith leibh Cha bhi cuimhn' air bhur feum dhaibh, Cha bhi cuimhn' air mar smàladh Thar sàl do thìr chéin sibh, Mar chaidh fearann a dhiùltadh 'S mar a chum iad na féidh bhuaibh, Mar a chu iad an t-iasg bhuaibh Agus ianlaith nan speuran. When the enemy threaten, It's the Gael who is called - Each earl and each lord Implores you to rise, Dukes show you respect And the Crown gives you its share; But when peace is secured by you They'll forget how you served them, They'll forget you were banished Far over the sea, And how land was refused And they forbade you the deer, And forbade you the fish And the birds of the air. - Ruairidh MacAoidh

Geithner’s proposed terms for the loan—which drew heavily on the work of bankers he had asked to explore options for private financing for AIG—included a floating interest rate starting at about 11.5 percent. AIG would also be required to give the government an ownership share of almost 80 percent of the company. Tough terms were appropriate. Given our relative unfamiliarity with the company, the difficulty of valuing AIG FP’s complex derivatives positions, and the extreme conditions we were seeing in financial markets, lending such a large amount inevitably entailed significant risk. Evidently, it was risk that no private-sector firm had been willing to undertake. Taxpayers deserved adequate compensation for bearing that risk. In particular, the requirement that AIG cede a substantial part of its ownership was intended to ensure that taxpayers shared in the gains if the company recovered. Equally important, tough terms helped address the unfairness inherent in aiding AIG and not other firms, while also serving to mitigate the moral hazard arising from the bailout. If executives at similarly situated firms believed they would get easy terms in a government bailout, they would have little incentive to raise capital, reduce risk, or accept market offers for their assets or their company. The Fed and Treasury had pushed for tough terms for the shareholders of Bear Stearns and Fannie and Freddie for precisely these reasons. The political backlash would be intense no matter what we did, but we needed to show that we got taxpayers the best possible deal and had minimized the windfall that the bailout gave to AIG and its shareholders.

not only is the structure of the modern economy inaccessible to ordinary consumers, it can be inaccessible to the people setting public policy. Often, it’s beyond the CEOs in relevant industries (AIG sank in part because executives did not understand its own financial products).

More specifically, there was no orderly process for allowing a handful of giant troubled firms to go bankrupt in a way that would not cause the rest of the system to unravel (e.g., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG).

during the 2008 crisis, corporate welfare reached new heights. In the great bailout of the Great Recession, one corporation alone, AIG, got more than $180 billion—more than was spent on welfare to the poor from 1990 to 2006.68 As

An even more pointed reminder of changed circumstances, of course, is the AIG symbol sported, doubtless with some chagrin, by Manchester United, worth £14 million a year to the club when the deal was done thirty months ago, but now as ignominiously conspicuous as mouthing a slogan for Luftschiffbau Zeppelin in May 1937: ‘You’ll always travel Fuhrer class on the Hindenburg!’ Man

By bombs, I meant huge, far-flung, overleveraged institutions whose failure could spark the kind of global panic the Lehman bankruptcy had sparked in the fall. I listed them: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Citigroup, and Bank of America. They all were much larger than Lehman. All five had received major infusions of government cash to save them from failure; AIG had been rescued three times in four months. But they all were in trouble again, and we needed to make sure they didn’t explode—not to protect them from the consequences of their mistakes, but to prevent another messy failure from ravaging the rest of the economy. The politics would be awful. People hated the idea of government bailouts for mismanaged financial behemoths. But if their creditors or the markets in general lost confidence that any of them could meet their obligations, we’d be looking at a worldwide financial meltdown, and a much deeper economic crisis.

At 6 P.M. Paulson and Bernanke briefed members of the House and Senate leadership. They had little choice, Bernanke explained. AIG was one of the ten most popular stocks in Americans’ 401(k) accounts. The Fed would have to loan AIG $85 billion.

In 2009, an American soldier named Bowe Bergdahl slipped through a gap in the concertina wire at his combat outpost in southern Afghanistan and walked off into the night. He was quickly captured by a Taliban patrol, and his absence triggered a massive search by the US military that put thousands of his fellow soldiers at risk. The level of betrayal felt by soldiers was so extreme that many called for Bergdahl to be tried for treason when he was repatriated five years later. Technically his crime was not treason, so the US military charged him with desertion of his post—a violation that still carries a maximum penalty of death. The collective outrage at Sergeant Bergdahl was based on very limited knowledge but provides a perfect example of the kind of tribal ethos that every group—or country—deploys in order to remain unified and committed to itself. If anything, though, the outrage in the United States may not be broad enough. Bergdahl put a huge number of people at risk and may have caused the deaths of up to six soldiers. But in purely objective terms, he caused his country far less harm than the financial collapse of 2008, when bankers gambled trillions of dollars of taxpayer money on blatantly fraudulent mortgages. These crimes were committed while hundreds of thousands of Americans were fighting and dying in wars overseas. Almost 9 million people lost their jobs during the financial crisis, 5 million families lost their homes, and the unemployment rate doubled to around 10 percent. For nearly a century, the national suicide rate has almost exactly mirrored the unemployment rate, and after the financial collapse, America’s suicide rate increased by nearly 5 percent. In an article published in 2012 in The Lancet, epidemiologists who study suicide estimated that the recession cost almost 5,000 additional American lives during the first two years—disproportionately among middle-aged white men. That is close to the nation’s losses in the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. If Sergeant Bergdahl betrayed his country—and that’s not a hard case to make—surely the bankers and traders who caused the financial collapse did as well. And yet they didn’t provoke nearly the kind of outcry that Bergdahl did. Not a single high-level CEO has even been charged in connection with the financial collapse, much less been convicted and sent to prison, and most of them went on to receive huge year-end bonuses. Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products—known as “Mr. Credit-Default Swap”—led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees—including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment.

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.

If AIG went under, it could take the entire financial system along with it.

I thought—that AIG’s shareholders would be even worse off in a bankruptcy,

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

The fact is that one person’s growth stock is another’s value stock. Recently, the investment data company Lipper has reported that Citigroup, AIG and IBM are among the top 15 mutual fund holdings in both the large company “value” and “growth” categories. This brings us to our next point, which perhaps best explains why Marathon should never be labelled as a pure value investor. Our capital cycle process examines the effects of the creative and destructive forces of capitalism over time. A growth stock usually becomes a value stock after excess capital, lured in by large current profitability, brings about a decline in returns. When this becomes extreme, as was the case during the technology bubble, the resultant bust can turn growth stocks into value stocks almost overnight. The telecoms sector provides

Temblando, tomó el rostro del hombre entre sus manos y se puso de puntillas para besarle con todo el amor que sentía por él. Porque no hay nada como un beso para disipar el frío de los corazones solitarios. Porque no hay mejor declaración de amor que un beso en el que se entrega el alma.

If we don’t do this,” Paulson told them, the impact of an AIG bankruptcy would “be felt across America and around the world.

And I also believe we will get back a large part, if not all, of the TARP money that was put into AIG and the auto companies.

Cuirtear ina luí orainn gur féidir le haon duine, an t-amadán san áireamh, dul chun cinn a dhéanamh sa saol má bhíonn muinín aige as a c(h)umas féin.

Going public is a sign a company has found enough competitive advantages to scale into a large corporation. But almost 40% of all public companies lost all their value from 1980-2014. A list of top ten fortune 500 companies that went bankrupts includes: General Motors, Crysler, Kodak and Sears. General Electric, Time Warner, AIG and Motorola. Countries follow similar fates. At various points in the past, the world scientific and economic progress has been dominate by Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Whenever a once-powerful thing loses an advantage, it's tempting to ridicule the mistakes of it's leaders but it's easy to overlook how many forces pull you away from a competitive advantage simply BECAUSE you have one. Success has it's own gravity. The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the easier to see it's ass.

suspected that Chris was trying to buy pieces of AIG on the cheap, and I promised he would not be part of the meeting.

JP Morgan knew AIG inside out as a result of having worked for it for the past six months and could get everyone up to speed quickly on the depth of its problems.

With the markets so uncertain, it was impossible to predict how many companies might produce AIG-like surprises that would require government intervention.

AIG had promised those bonuses well before it began receiving government assistance.

The government wouldn’t have control of AIG, but we thought we had to install new leadership.

If we had done for Lehman what we did for AIG, we just would have financed a run on an unsalvageable institution.

AIG FP’s risk was compounded by the difficulty in valuing its highly complex positions,

Meanwhile, AIG’s negotiations with potential investors had not gone well.

By Monday we had little doubt about the magnitude of the danger that AIG posed.

filled me in on a call he and other Board staff had had with AIG,

Did the government make a conscious decision to let Lehman fail, and, if so, why did it go on to save AIG?

Unlike AIG, which had sufficient collateral to back a large loan from the Fed, Lehman had neither a plausible plan to stabilize itself nor sufficient collateral to back a loan of the size needed to prevent its collapse.

Consequently, many viewed the subsequent decision on AIG as an inconsistent reversal, rather than what it was: a different response to different circumstances.

I explained that AIG differed from Lehman,

Value #1: Reality Huh? Isn’t every business based on reality? In fact, isn’t everything based on reality? Actually, no. Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG (American International Group), IndyMac, Washington Mutual, Countrywide, and all the other banks that blew themselves to smithereens in 2008 weren’t basing their businesses on reality. They were basing their businesses on sheer fantasy, wish, and whim—and an unhealthy dose of greed, the most unrealistic thing of all. They believed the housing market would always go up. Credit markets would never be illiquid. People with no jobs could pay back their mortgages.

The deals the government and Wall Street worked out that weekend to save the likes of AIG, Goldman, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch were unprecedented in their reach and political consequence, transforming America into a permanent oligarchical bailout state. This was, essentially, a formal merger of Wall Street and the U.S. government.