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AIG Contemplates Joining Stockholder Suit Against US Gov't
inode_buddha writes "After completing its bailout rescue and paying back the money with interest, AIG is considering suing the US Government for doing so. The reasons why? Among other things, the 14% interest rate paid to the government. 'The lawsuit does not argue that government help was not needed. It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue — the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal's high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer's Wall Street clients — deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for "public use, without just compensation." The former CEO and current major shareholder said: "The government has been saying, 'We're your friend, we owned and controlled you and we let you go.' But A.I.G. doesn't owe loyalty to the government," a person close to Mr. Greenberg said. "It owes loyalty to its shareholders."' The lawyer representing him is none other than David Boies of SCO fame."
say it aint so!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
'Nuf said
For not putting any of the criminals responsible for the financial collpase in prison where they belong. Now those same criminals are suing the government. Sadly the US taxpayer will once again be on the hook for the payout.
They were perfectly free to reject the taxpayer bailout and look for money elsewhere.
... was learned...
1) If it's too big to fail... break it up. (once the economy recovers a bit more)
2) Don't save companies from failure.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
The new AIG TV commercials are hilariously sappy. Good luck with your PR campaign if you turn around and sue the US Govt/People for bailing you out.
Government should have let AIG go under, then arrested the Executives for reckless and negligent endangerment to their employees.
A companies first and foremost responsibility is to it's customers, 2nd to it's employees and finally 3rd to it's shareholders.
Any other order makes for short-term profits, long term failure, which is why the government stepped in your fucktard loser former CEO. Go shoot yourself and save the rest of us the headaches and hassles.
Will someone put these motherfuckers against the wall and shoot them already?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
AIG was a risky investment. Anyone who would have invested in AIG at that time would expect a return that balanced that risk - that includes the taxpayers.
Pigs coming back for seconds. Should have let their stocks become worthless.
In rough numbers, it looks like brass scrap is going for about $2.33/lb. Given the big brass balls that AIG apparently possesses, they should never have needed any sort of bailout in the first place...
(And, incidentally, if that 14% interest rate was so crushingly unfair, where exactly were the private lenders willing to offer better rates and cut big, bad, Uncle Sam out of the picture?)
I hope they win their lawsuit. If only the shareholders and bond holders of GM would do the same. What a massive money laundering scheme.
UAW supports Obama
Obama takes over most of GM shares screwing the bond holders (mostly retirement funds) in the process
Obama gives most shares to the UAW
UAW waits six months and sells the shares
Each of these steps were covered in the regular media but, for some reason I have yet to see an article putting all the steps together. If you think this is an anti-Obama thing it isn't as it would be equally as terrible if a Republican did it.
And then settle in for a nice long chew. What undoubtedly happened is that the bailout interfered with some upper management pig's hedge fund investment and he didn't make the millions in profits he was expecting when the company finally failed.
Interesting implication. To bother with the lawsuit, they must be planning a repeat performance, and don't want their bets interfered with this time.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I have an even better idea: Let's get the entire population of US citizens to file a suit against the government, and all the politicians individually, for wasting our money bailing out failing companies.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Now, I wasn't in favor of the bailouts to begin with. I'm generally in favor of deregulation, and the only way that deregulated businesses learn their lesson is to be allowed to crash and burn on their own. These guys should have paid the price for their failure to understand how to do business so that the stockholders and the boards would understand in the future that they cannot allow bozos to run their businesses.
However, AIG stockholders are still in the wrong here, despite the forced bailout. How can you say you might have made more money when your other option was collapse? It's clear that the interest rate was very high, but it was well within AIG's ability to pay it (obviously). And now, those stockholders are trying to double down. No way.
Of course, this case seems so absurd on the face of it, that I must be missing something. I'm probably going to see what the details are, but at this point, it is looking like funny business.
Fuck You, you greedy parasitic assholes.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It gets in the way of corporate policy.
I would not put anything beyond the messed up court system when it comes to lawsuits asking for billions of dollars in damages. But it smells more like a pump and dump scheme. People must have purchased lots of AIG stock quietly over the last two years. There will be a media flurry. A few shills will mention the law suits has merits. That is the pumping. A few wealthy but gullible investors, mostly trust fund babies who think they are competent to manage their trust funds themselves, will be induced buy this stock. That will be the dumping. Then who knows what happens in the courts?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How does this guy keep finding work? His track record seems iffy since his last "big" win against Microsoft.
The AIG (and other) bailouts were not typical bankruptcy cases. These are initiated by creditors when the debtor can't meet obligations. The government's role (the courts) is only to oversee the terms of the reorganization/liquidation. With AIG, the court case will probably depend on who and how AIG was found to be illiquid (or under capitalized), and how the exchange of equity for a capital injection was requested. If AIG's board of directors came looking for help, the government may not be guilty of taking private property. If the BoD negotiated that deal, it was their prerogative to do so, or they are the ones shareholders should be suing (good luck with that).
One could claim that AIG management was pressured into taking the deal. But much of that pressure came from other private investment banks to keep the AIG paper they held from becoming worthless. The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy may stand as evidence of the government offering the option of allowing investment banking to solve its own problems without intervention.
Have gnu, will travel.
1. AIG got into their desperate situation because got tricked by Goldman Sachs into buying bad loans. (Just like Greece, and many others.)
2. The government guy who "handled" the AIG bailout, was Lloid Blankfein's closest friend and ex-colleage.
3. That guy immediately had a meeting with Blankfein after AIG announced their problems, to decide what to do. (Imagine your biggest competitor conspiring with the government on fucking you over.)
4. So Goldman Sachs massively profited from this failed assassination attempt. And the government was in on it.
So yeah. They got a really fuckin' good reason to sue the government!
IMO, that shit is treason, among other massively evil business practices. And Blankfein and his pals belong to prison.
They destroy the economy and then when we bail them out they want to sue US THE PEOPLE the very ones that bailed them out. As far as im concerned if they need help again "F" them and LET THEM FAIL AND GO UNDER, BUNCH OF UNGRATEFUL BASTARDS.
Banks are key infrastructure, almost like electricity and water. Our economy depends on them running smoothly. Thus, we have to treat them as a protected resource, not just some random widget maker.
One could also argue the same for the auto industry in the north east because the economy in that region was heavily dependent on a few companies. Part of the problem is that we allowed oligopolies to form such that failure is almost all or nothing: too big a granularity of change.
Oligopolies are a problem because they create "too big to fail". If there were a dozen or so car companies, then a couple of them failing wouldn't cause the same devastation.
Oligopolies often argue that they need "economy of scale" to be efficient, but that's usually just an excuse. Sub-system specialists could provide economy of scale for specific portions of cars, and perhaps facilitate more standardization.
Table-ized A.I.
This is particularly hilarious to me because AIG just started airing TV commercials giving themselves a nice big PR pat on the back for explicitly "paying back with interest".
14% in a 1% environment does seem like a high interest rate. Instead of a loan, assuming we had to help which I don't, the government should have taken an equity stake like it did with GM.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
So they are complaining about the 14% interest rate. Wow, when the shoe's on the other foot, suddenly it's pretty shitty to get subprime rates, huh.
If I were in charge of the bailout process, the first step in any bailout would be to fire the entire management team, without exceptions. Anyone with truly unique knowledge of the company's processes could be hired as a short term consultant. Modern American management tends to be both incompetent and convinced of their irreplaceability; if they wreck a company, they need to be shown the door.
Also, anything too big to fail should be nationalized and broken up and then the pieces sold on the market (e.g., by an IPO).
Yes, this would tend to hurt the old shareholders. Guess what? Their company went broke. If it is liquidated, the shareholders are last in line to share in the assets and will typically get nothing.
Just typical,
Give us the cash and not the expense.
Oh, I do not like having to pay 14% but I will allow those Pay Day Loans, Credit Cards, etc., to charge 25% or more interest and then tack on Service Fees for a total cost of 110% or greater in total percentage cost.
It would be nice if the US could smarten up and requre AIG to pay the full costs the Government needed to defend the American Citizen and Tax Payer specifically.
In the end the US Citizens will be on the hook for this. Else there is something that is happening in Congress we are not supposed to see.
If you gave two shits about your shareholders, you wouldn't have gotten into the kind of trouble that you did.
Can the whole world sue the financial industry for the mess they made by taking worthless debt and shuffling it around so that it looked like AAA stuff? You know, all of those worthless mortgages and "Asset Backed Paper Commodity" shit they made to look valuable and pawned off on everybody else?
Because if these guys hadn't skimmed everything off the top, and diluted things which had read value, the whole financial melt-down would have never have happened.
Most people's investments haven't recovered, so how about we hold AIG culpable for part of that?
The fallout from the stupid behavior of all of these international bankers fucked us all ... and now we have lawsuits about shareholder profit from the bailout? Asshats.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
When AIG took on the deal, their stock price was crap. They expected that once they took the deal, which was the USG buying preferred stock, which pays dividends, that the stock price would fall and stay LOWER than the buy price until the USG's stocks were bought off from payment via dividends and cash buyback. This turned out NOT to be the case and the stock price went ABOVE what the USG bought it for. What AIG is crying about, is the fact that they had to buy back their OWN STOCK from the USG, which they had an option NOT TO TAKE, at the current market rate which was, surprise surprise, HIGHER than when it sold it to the USG. There's nothing to sue over here. It was a standard loan backed by the only asset that AIG had at the time: its own stock. No "property" was bought by the government, and the government's voting rights were limited by the wording of the purchase, even though it should have had a ridiculous amount of power with that large of a percentage of *PREFERRED STOCKS*.
I was pissed off from day one that AIG got any bailout at all. I watched these people try (and luckily fail) to pull every dirty trick they could on a friend who had a legitimate workman's comp claim.
The guy, litterally, had a saw blade go through the knuckle on his index finger, half way through the middle of his hand. Doctors were telling him that he was not going to be able to go back to that kind of work and would need to be retrained for something else... this wasn't some guy with phantom "back pain". It wasn't that he completely couldn't work...he tried to see if he could even go back part time, and it didn't work, his hand just couldn't take it.
It seemed like every other month they would kick him off the program and make him go to court to get back on. Then, when he is desperate and hasn't seen a check in a few weeks, and has to choose between working illegally and risking injuring himself worst....or not feeding his kids.... hard to feed a family pan handling, or living off friends and family for weeks at a time while the courts sort it all out.... thats when they start sending PIs around to document everything.
(he got so frustrated he approached one of them and confirmed as best one can, he said the guy paniced and pretended he was looking for someone else)
So in short....fuck AIG. I can understand trying to find fraud, but trying to make people desperate enough to break the rules so you can catch them? That left a real sour taste in my mouth about them.
The irony is that Paulson really pushed through the AIG bailout to save his buddies at Goldman Sachs, who otherwise probably would have gone down the tubes (and they got bailed out at 100 cents on the dollar, courtesy of the AIG bailout). If he had done the reponsible (and legal thing) AIG would have been separated into two companies; a "good" regulated company that had adequate reserves, and a "bad" company that was selling credit default swaps it couldn't honor. If that course had been taken, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and probably a few others would have gone down the tubes, but it would have been bankers taking the haircuts instead of taxpayers.Remember: Paulson ran Goldman Sachs before he became Treasury Secretary.
Don't take the money, and use the alternative.... Bankruptcy court, which is explicitly designed for companies that can't pay their bills / meet their commitments
After which, the "Shareholders" would be left with how much?
So don't complain, Uncle Sam bailed you out and charged you for it, I'd suggest the interest charged is far too low, and the offer shouldn't have been made.
Unreasonable? How? Don't accept the deal, and use the alternatives...
Oh wait, nobody else would bail it out, since it was so *ed? Back to Bankruptcy court, which does have the ability to expedite things...
I expect the settlement (whatever the end value is) to be 90% cash to the plaintiff attorneys and 10% to be distributed to the plaintiffs in the form of AIG stock.
bah.
What, pulling your collecting asses out of the fire in the first place isn't "just compensation"?
If they really think 14% is onerous, then I look forward to their support for laws against usury, and their principled moral stance against credit cards and the pay-day loan industry.
I won't be holding my breath.
misshaps coming down on the AIG higher up and the lawyers?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
What a bunch of ungrateful bastards.
AIG's stock had fallen 95% in a matter of months and the company was days away from bankruptcy. If 14 percent interest was so damn high, why the hell didn't they make the deal with the private investors that were willing to go with a lower rate than the feds?
Oh, that's right, because there weren't any.
Will someone put these motherfuckers against the wall and shoot them already?
Hitler tried, but we stopped him.
if they wanted to see how bad interest rates can be for high risk borrowers. Or a title loan on your car's title. Both semi secured debt and I think these run 25 to 30% interest rate. Yeah, cry me a river AIG.
I think their argument is full of shit. No one held a gun to their head, either when they made such piss poor decisions that got them into the mess they created or when they stood in line for the bailout. And I know that I will never see dollar one of the money they would be awarded in any lawsuit, so don't argue that you're doing this on my behalf.
Frankly, I already made my money. I bought it at the firesale for a buck a share, on the day when they were declared "too big to fail". At the moment I am writing this, those same shares are worth 35.50. AIG is just pissed off that they couldn't do the same thing, a point made by another poster here.
Private equity bailouts of struggling companies about to go insolvent are much worse. As others have already stated, it's going to be pretty hard to convince a jury that "taken for public use" is what actually happened with AIG... more like an arms-length exchange between two willing (and one very motivated) counterparties.
Capitalism, meet capitalism.
Do they not see how completely retarded they look right now, whining about this stupid shit?
Confirming that SCO is a vampire from hell!
That AIG will join the suit, and then a judge will slap all their dumb asses with Rule 11 sanctions, resulting in million dollar fines. That would be such sweet justice.
AIG cooked its ' deals'. Different than cooking the books. Have fun Justice!
Dear Financial Industry,
Best get a hold of this prick and muzzle that shit. Otherwise, next time, we're going to use this story to whip up public support for letting you all burn to the ground.
Warmest Regards,
The Society That Permits You To Exist
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Obviously they agreed to take the money and to pay it back. It is that simple. Worse yet from their point of view just what profits would have been made if they had shut down without accepting that loan?
Bringing this kind of junk into a court room speaks badly as to what advice they received.
The quality of this suit is so bad that it is like me trying to sue NYC for trauma of seeing the World Trade Center collapse on TV even though I live in Florida and had no family in that region of the nation. Some people file really stupid law suits and then whine when they have to pay the bills for the courts and lawyers.
AIG will not do anything of the sort. Why would they want to? Suing on behalf of former stock holders would be against the interests of current stock holders.
The first 1-pager is Paulson's talking points for the bank. It basically confirms that he put a gun to all their heads. It says they must agree to take their cash, and that if they protested, then each bank's regulator would force them to take it anyway.
No. The banks jumped at the money but they and Paulson didn't want the public to panic if they found out how shaky the banks really were. So Paulson made up that BS story about forcing the banks to take the money.
Source
As time goes on, we're hearing more and more about the shenanigans that were done at the expense of the US taxpayer.
They are bound to it, no matter how bad the terms of the deal are.
Otherwise, each and everyone one of us with a mortgage can go sue our banks, for leading us into a bad deal with onerous interest rates.
I'm sure everyone foreclosed on would be willing to sue their bank just for the taste of revenge....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If by "forced," you mean "they were desperate for money but nobody would lend to them," then you would be right. AIG could have tried to issue some corporate bonds, but would you have been willing to buy them? Would you have purchased preferred stock? Would you have loaned them a single penny when they were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy?
If the shareholders think the deal was bad, they should sue the executives who agreed to it. Of course, they all know that the only remaining alternative was to declare bankruptcy, so what this really is about is a greedy attempt to get even more money.
Palm trees and 8
The practices they pulled on their own customers were way more unjust. I have no sympathy. If you don't want the bailout, don't ask for it. Give me my money back.
It's corporate death penalty time!
There is a war going on for your mind.
when they had a chance.
Tell us again how the "47%" are the ones expecting handouts? How they feel "entitled" to free stuff?
Excuse me?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Privatize the profits in any way possible... even retroactively.
Externalize the costs in any way possible.. hell, that's just business.
It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue — the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal's high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer's Wall Street clients — deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for "public use, without just compensation
So instead the government should have let AIG go bankrupt and the shareholders and most bond holders would have received nothing at all. AIG shareholders did absolutely nothing to keep AIG from making the stupid and risky investments that got them and the rest of the economy in trouble. Last I checked something > nothing so I'm a little confused about how shareholders were deprived of something.
What a bunch of a$$hats.
AIG = Ain't I Grateful?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
we should have let them sink.
talk about biting the hand that feeds. It was bad enough we bailed them out in the first place.
This is insult to injury.
I wonder what rate Goldman Sacks or any other large bank would have loan money to AIG at. I wait, I know, infinity. Because no one was willing to bet on their retarded bankrupted ass. So 14% sounds like a deal to me. Hell try getting a credit card with that rate when you have bad credit.
1. I'd like to address the double negative.
2. you can always claim someone got screwed in hindsight. I don't see AIG claiming this before the turn of events.
When corporations are people and we find them guilty of treason (shouldn't ALL multi-nationals be considered treasonous?) you don't kill the corporation by executing its officers. Instead you execute a corporation by REVOKING THEIR CORPORATE CHARTER.
The suit has been filed by AIG shareholders - led by Hank Greenberg (former head and majority shareholder of AIG). He is approaching the AIG board and asking them to join the suit. The board sees the need to listen to his arguments because he is a majority shareholder and has a large number of other shareholders on his side. In short, the board is merely doing its duty and listening to the shareholders who have appointed them.
AIG, at this point, has not joined the lawsuit. At this point, your anger should be directed at the group led by Greenberg. You may also want to note that this is not the first suit that Greenberg has filed regarding this issue. Another similar suit (I believe targeted at the New York branch of the Fed) was recently thrown out. AIG was not party to that suit.
The capitalists have killed off any hope for a capitalist future. The baby WILL be thrown out with the bathwater because we the people are getting to the point where we HAVE to throw out our elite masters. When our society finally wakes up and reacts to the dick up their ass, they will always over react.
It didn't have to come to this, but the capitalists have gone off the rails...
The guy pushing for the suit, Hank Greenberg, wasn't in charge of AIG at the time of the bailout. He used to run AIG, and has a less-than-sterling reputation, but the shenanigans that caused AIG's collapse did not occur on his watch.
All that said, this is a steaming pile of bullshit. The alternative to the govt. bailout (now shown to have been a REALLY good idea, given how it's made money and prevented the next Great Depression) instant bankruptcy where the shareholders would have been left with 0%, instead of the 20% of the company they ended up with.
I think this whole thing's a bit of a red herring. Yes, AIG paid back their bailout money with interest. But if I remember correctly, the government made good on all the AIG insured mortgage backed securities as part of the bank bailouts in addition to bailing out AIG itself. I could be wrong about that, but there was so much cronyism going on in the TARP process that it's safe to assume there's some bait-and-switch going on in the repayment process.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
How can they say "without just compensation" with a straight face?
How on earth is SAVING YOU FROM COMPLETE FAILURE and producing a situation where YOU PROFITED AND EVEN NOW STILL EXIST, was not just compensation?
How about the US Government sues them for fraud and destabilizing the economy and the downstream effects of all that? Are these wall street jackasses so 'entitled' that they need to be saved and then don't credit the savior? The national guard should go to AIG and shoot these treasonous pieces of trash.
"They", in this case, refers specifically to AIG, not banks in general. AIG wasn't a bank, it was an insurance company. It wasn't a part of the general program where the Fed forced banks to borrow money; it was a separate bailout that occurred prior to the bank forced-capitalization program.
AIG, was in a gigantic liquidity crisis and would have gone bankrupt in a couple of days due to inability to borrow money to pay the influx of claims from the Bear Stearns collapse, along with paying out on the default protection insurance they had written on $hitty mortgages. Nobody would lend money to them except for the feds.
oh please, Greece was not tricked by Goldman to do anything. Greece wanted to do shady business with Goldman to hide the ugly truth about their finances to avoid the attention of the EU's eye of Sauron. Unhappy Sauron = smaller stream of free monies from the EU.
You are advocating murder you fuckhead. I know people like you think it's cute and funny to talk about murdering rich people, but at the end of the day, it's just murder. Rich people are people like you and me, and they deserve to live just as much.
If you're insolvent, go to the bank and ask for a loan to help you out. If they DO loan you money, do you think it'd be any less than 25% APR?
Go to one of those payday loan sharks. 14600% or more APR.
They had no interest in 'saving' AIG at all. Their interest was in using it as a conduit to keep Goldman Sachs (principally) and a few other investment houses in business and with good profits. It is far to long to write about here, but anybody can research what was done with the CDS and options and how GS got 100% payout when the norm is far, far less. A bridge loan during the liquidity crisis of 2008 (arranged but not necessarily from the Fed) would have enabled AIG to continue in business and without wiping out its shareholders (that would be you 401K and pension plan owner) but would have resulted in reduced payments to Goldmans and much litigation.
The trouble arises when the shareholders *are* the executives, as is often the case...
C|N>K
This is all just theoretical debate at this point. It is a little known fact that you cannot sue the Federal government unless they agree to be sued. If the agency choses to ignore the law suit there is nothing the anyone can do about it. The government normally only allows law suits against them to help clarify law and limits of authority via the court systems.
There's all this arguing on this thread yet not ONE SINGLE link to ANY of Matt Taibbi's articles in Rolling Stone?
Here's one!
Secrets and Lies of the Bailout
The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme.
www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the-bailout-20130104
Also, you guys realize that a whole lot of AIG's bailout money went to repaying CDOs that Goldman Sachs took out from them?
Sure the money was for GS.
But AIG was done, toast. Shares were worthless. Liabilities far exceeded assets. Any value AIG shareholders get is thanks to government interference. GS also got it's 100% thanks to the government.
AIG wasn't credit worthy. I would no more give them a government loan then I would give a government credit card to those going _into_ bankruptcy proceedings. The only thing they had to 'secure' the loan was the company, and that required some 'creative' accounting.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
AIG got a bail out so they can shut the fuck up.
Banks got bailed out, while the working class got sold out.
If AIG like the rest of corporate America hadn't done such a shitty job of running their businesses, they wouldn't have needed the bailout.
Maybe next time we should just take all these too big to fail fuckers into receivership, fire the executives, and dissolve the companies. AIG got a sweet ass deal. They need to fuck off and not get noisy about what a bad deal it was, or they're going to be facing the torch-bearing mob at their fucking front door next.
ASSHOLES.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
lol
ayottesoftware.com
So, AIG forgets that before the handout they were essentially worthless?
What arrogance!
Corporations are people. A person declaring to have no loyalty to the government is committing treason. At the time, and as now, we're at war. Treason during wartime carries a certain death penalty.
Your move, AIG...
AC
"Insurance Company, insure thyself!"
Outright theft from shareholders is a crime. But having other considerations besides profit in mind is not. It may make you a poor director. It may make you unlikely to be nominated for another term. It may get you sued. But it won't get you put in prison, unless you commit an actual crime related to the breach (insider trading, insider dealing, etc.)
It's not like this company had a lack of decent lawyers to go over the agreement. If the government came out ahead on the deal then hurray for Obama.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Nuf said.
Clearly AIG was "credit" worthy as the liquidity provided by the Fed and Treasury was returned and the company exisits today. And this after they used AIG to pay off GS and others for contracts that at worst should not have been paid more than 60% and at best, might never had been paid due to fraud claims which probably would still be in the courts today. Also include Treasury's profit on Maiden Lane. AIG's crisis was not one of solvency per se, but one of liquidity I do fault AIG mgt for failing to better reserve funds but given that the credit lines with banks they relied on were yanked (in part because of their own difficulties) it would have been impossible to put aside suffiicent funds to handle the storm on their own. I suppose it should also be a lesson to every other corporation that their credit lines are worthless as they will not be honored, regardless of any underlying assets or collateral (such as the aircraft leasing unit or the foreign life companies that were eventually sold).