Call To "Open Source" AIG Investigation
VValdo writes "As you may recall, the citizens of the US shelled out about $85 billion to bail out AIG and its creditors (Goldman Sachs in particular) last year. But as 80% owners of AIG, we still don't know what happened, exactly. That may change. In a new op-ed piece, former prosecutors (including former NY governor Eliot Spitzer) are calling for the US Treasury to force AIG to release its treasure-trove of emails to the public before allowing AIG to 'break free' of our control. As the prosecutors put it, 'By putting the evidence online, the government could establish a new form of "open source" investigation. Once the documents are available for everyone to inspect, a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom, as reporters, victims and angry citizens have a chance to piece together the story.' Good idea?"
We own 80% of AIG, so 80% of AIG is technically part of the federal government. That means we should have open access to everything just like we should have open access to the Congress, senate, court system, etc.
This will *never* happen. GS is far too powerful to let that happen. The AIG bailout was quite simply a giveaway to GS.
No, not a good idea. What is the point in having a Cultural Revolution? Better to just split these companies which are too big to fail into smaller chunks, kick out the top management making sure they never work in that capacity anymore, enforce layers of separation between businesses and let them free. Restore the Glass–Steagall Act and separate commercial banking from investment banking.
Put PJ in charge! :)
Unlike movies, the guys in high places taking home the multimillion dollar salaries 99% of the time dont get caught. They cover for each other.
Sad fact of life,
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
As purported owners of 80% of AIG, shouldn't taxpayers also be concerned that the information released could compromise the viability of their investment necessary to regain their lost billions?
I'd love to know what happened but I also want the money they took from me plus an onerous amount of interest. I think the interest will discourage them (and anyone who looks up to their executives as examples of how to rape taxpayers) from repeating their greed/mistakes. Of course what they really deserved was to sink like the anchors they were... Seriously, if you divide the TARP bailout money it comes out to $20,000 per US citizen. My savings and investments can't cover that level of corporate charity disguised as taxes.
A corporation's, or any other authority's "right to privacy" should be much more limited than it is. And even more obviously, we shouldn't be giving it rights as a person. What an absurd concept! But since we always try to put a human face on everything, from god on down, it seems inevitable. And vigilantism becomes inevitable when the confines of the law aren't applied equally and the system breaks down.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
We know exactly what happened... a few *idiots* in AIG's derivatives trading department thought they could sell credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities without keeping *anything* in reserve. It's actually a great strategy... unless housing prices go down, in which case you will take huge, mind-boggling losses. Essentially a few people in one department of an otherwise well run institution took down the whole thing by drastically underestimating risk.
Credit default swaps are an insurance product. If you sell them, then you had better keep proper reserves to cover claims AND you had better buy reinsurance in case there is a market downturn. AIG did neither and went kaput.
This is a great idea, but it is POST-crash thinking. That's how prosecutors think: They wait for something bad to happen, see blood in the water and then look for the crime. Certainly this is a part of how regulation must happen.
But, there is an even more powerful, I would say way more powerful, idea lurking behind what they are considering: Why not "open source" the whole industry? For example:
o Have open source analytics that measure risk and values and apply those analytics against firm positions to show aggregate exposures and stress values? The recent "stress tests" that were performed against the banks were generally considering quite weak by industry standards. For example, they were based on single scenarios being applied against option-like positions. And, the scenarios were simply housing and interest rate related but not further defined by prepayment and default models. A full analytics package applied with monte carlo methods would give a much more robust answer of the true risks. Shouldn't we know exactly what exposure all large firms have? If the market has much more information on the risks that various firms are taking, it will be much easier to reward good decisions and punish bad ones.
o Force all firms of a given size to publish their largest counter-party exposures on a daily basis. If I own BAC and they are long AIG, shouldn't I as a shareholder be able to see the exposure? Shouldn't anyone be able to see that, for the benefit of the whole? If you produce enough of the counter-party graph connectedness, the market will have much more information on system stability and be able to punish/reward bad/good decisions.
o Shouldn't we be able to see prices of ALL transactions that occur in the capital markets? This is a pretty simple database: CUSIP, Date/Time, Amount, Price. Currently members of the public can only see corporate and (I believe) muni prices. What about MBS/ABS/CMBS/CDO/CLO etc? Also, for OTC transactions there could be other databases that show counter-parties, etc.
o How about seller transparency in fixed income markets? If an MBS deal is coming to market, shouldn't the buyers get access to all material information the sellers have? This would allow for a market where the buyers can actually price risk without massive information asymmetry.
o Getting back to open source analytics, having such analytics (paid for by the large financial firms and produced by independent modelers) would greatly help the fractured buy-side firms who simply can't otherwise compete with the large firms that develop sophisticated, proprietary analytics.
If you want to open source the capital markets, there are many, many things you could do that are proactive and would lead to much greater transparency and stability.
Lets break them up. The last thing that we need is have companies that are 'too big to fail'. We need more competition. If these companies that 'required' and accepted help, then we should break them up into at least 3 companies so that if any are ran into the ground again, we let them die.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As many accountants have said: Show me a company who does not get audited, and I will show you fraud.
There are only two options here:
Option1: We the People get ripped off.
Option2: We the People are allowed to see exactly where OUR money went.
All other options are Option 1 in disguise.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Being 80% owned does not integrate a corporation into the entity that owns it. Trust me, Verizon has been using the exact theory for decades to lock Verizon Wireless workers out of the main Verizon company's collective bargaining agreement. Also, ask the Rigases (who owned Adelphia) if full ownership entitles you to complete run of the company -- it can be a jailable offense if you go about owning the company you own to aggressively.
A stockholder company has a wide range of fiduciary issues. It's very likely that if the government, as 80% owner, tried to force corporate secrets into the open that the other 20% could sue them for abandoning their responsibility to the company.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I have no doubt that there is a lot of dirty stuff in those emails, so releasing them would be good.
Since clearly not everything could be released (HIPPA stuff, personal bank account numbers, etc.), this raises the question of who would remove the private information, and whether they could be trusted. Clearly, if this was done by AIG, an amazing amount of stuff would presumably be declared personal and private and not for release.
not only is it a great idea, it should have been a requirement before the bailout.
While it is certainly easy to suggest something like this for those evil people at AIG, it presupposes that those good prosecutors and men at law that would protect us from such evil themselves are actually good. In truth the situation is much more grey than that. Firstly consider that many prosecutors in the country are elected and the prosecutorial policy is originates in the politics of the various office holders. Are politicians so indifferent to their own self interest that such a policy as being proposed by the article could be executed in good faith? Of course not. Politicians, and those that serve at them, are as notorious as any 'fat cat' in using their position and power to their own benefit at the expense of the others. All this policy does is feed a sort of populist anger that garners political support for those that suggest it and at the expense of real justice for the small minority that it targets... regardless of their past transgressions. One should remember that enshrining rights, such as prohibitions against search and seizure without convincing a court, exist largely to protect minorities from majority exploitation.
The real sin in the AIG case, to be fair, was not any action of AIG at all. It was that we bought into the bogus notion that a firm can be 'too big too fail' and must be bailout out by Government. AIG made bad judgments and bad investments and its owners (shareholders, including big investment banks) allowed it to be managed poorly. The company should have been allowed to fail, something all those involved earned. What we did instead was reward the foolish risk taking made by the shareholders and the managers and, worse still, told future generations of shareholders and managers that taking these risks is OK... the government will bail you out if you lose so there really is no risk at all... you're too big too fail. Let em fail! Stop taking my savings, diluting my money, borrowing on my behalf to save businesses that by all rights have earned their failure (including all those that chose to have a business relationship). There are other insurance companies, there are other investment banks, and there are others capable of filling the gap responsibly. Sure none of them have such good friends as Geithner, Paulson, Obama, & Bush... but they can rise to the occassion.
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Lehman no longer exists, so I guess that makes us a one-party state? :p
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Ordinarily, I would think this might be a good idea. However, Eliot Spitzer is among those calling for it. In the past there were several times where he called for "public accountability" of various corporations. Those seemed like good ideas too. They turned out to just be shakedowns and/or publicity opportunities to advance his political career, not attempts to serve the public interest. If an organization has Eliot Spitzer as a member, I will not believe that they are seeking something in the public interest. This is about serving the personal interests of the people calling for it, not about serving the public interest.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
And here's the way it'll happen:
Support Ron Paul's bill http://www.auditthefed.com/ and http://www.campaignforliberty.com/
Why audit smalltime thieves when we could be coming after the GREATEST financial criminals this far into human history!!!
They stole trillions from us and wont tell us what they did with the money.
There's a difference between having 80% ownership of a corporation and owning indebtedness of 80% of a loan for the agreed value of a property. The bank can only ask you to satisfy the debt owed, not vote upon your decisions dealing with the property nor claim ownership before foreclosure.
There are two time frames which require serious investigation. The first is the period Sept 10-Sept 17. What was said in these meetings? Who was there? It is not even entirely clear that AIG would have failed so spectacularly had they been allowed (as proposed by NYS) to tap into some of the excess liquidity of the subs. AIG, similar to Lehmans, was all about liquidity and the lack of access to short term lending facilities. The marks that the CDS portfolio was set to take that quarter were survivable. The cash crunch came from the securities lending side as well as some debatable collateral calls by the likes of Goldmans. The government then decided to effectively do eniment domain on AIG - taking it from its shareholders (80%, they would have done 100% if law permitted) and making it a conduit to funnel money into other institutions. There was never any serious consideration given to assisting AIG, either through relaxed regulation or temporary bridge financing (public or some mixture private/public) at rates similar to those given other institutions which were far, far less punative..
Second, the time period when Treasury decided to force AIG to pay par on the CDS held by many of the counterparts, even though they were not entitled to par as most, if not all, the underlying CDOs had not yet entered default. Even so, CDS held by other institutions *never* paid at par, even when underlying bonds/structures had legitimately defaulted. It was not uncommon to only receive 65 or 70c on the dollar. Yet AIG was forced to make whole a slew of counterparts who at the least should have taken a sizable haircut if not been made to go to court to enforce their agreements if AIG had violated any of the terms.
Instead, not only did the government via Paulson/Geitner/Bernanke pay off the likes of Goldmans and Deutche, they hosed the US tax payer as well as the shareholders of AIG. Some may object to the last but consider that all the above events, particularly those in early September, amounted to the pilfering of the AIG shareholders too. Yes, they may ultimately have lost everything but the way things went down was a sham.
Another Zeitgeist victim. Here's a tip; read a book on basic finance. Better yet, just read a book. Any book. The Great Crash. Animal Farm. I don't care. Stop getting your information from YouTube and the odd polemical internet site.
Every single one of the arguments applied to "fiat money" can be just as easily applied to supposed "hard currencies" like gold. Remember, when gold or platinum or what have you is mined out of the ground, from a currency standpoint, that's exactly equivalent to some new dollar bills being printed. Dollars, euros and yen are worth money because they are (relatively) rare. It has sweet FA to do with debt. The circulation money has nothing to do with debt levels. Debt is not "created" by printing bills or mining metals. Debt is created when people spend more than they earn; which is what western society has been doing economically for 20 or more years. We'd be in debt if we used fiat money, the bren-whatever gold muck-about, or else just traded in bottlecaps.
And brainless fools require someone to pre-digest their information into a pseudo-intellectual web-video so it can be masticated into their waiting mouths. Learn to chew.
May the Maths Be with you!