You are here
The AIG Bailout Scandal
As Elizabeth Warren’s devastating Congressional report reveals, the Federal Reserve used taxpayer money to bail out the insurance giant, instead of forcing the major banks to clean up the mess they helped create. In so doing, the Fed may have set the system up for an even bigger fall in the future.
William Greider, The Nation
The government’s $182 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG should be seen as the Rosetta Stone for understanding the financial crisis and its costly aftermath. The story of American International Group explains the larger catastrophe not because this was the biggest corporate bailout in history but because AIG’s collapse and subsequent rescue involved nearly all the critical elements, including delusion and deception. These financial dealings are monstrously complicated, but this account focuses on something mere mortals can understand—moral confusion in high places, and the failure of governing institutions to fulfill their obligations to the public.
Three governmental investigative bodies have now pored through the AIG wreckage and turned up disturbing facts—the House Committee on Oversight and Reform; the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which will make its report at year’s end; and the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), which issued its report on AIG in June.
The battle over Elizabeth Warren, John Case, People's World
- Real consumer protection against fraud and misinformation in financial services is something the "financial sector" has fought for years. The catastrophe that required a $4 trillion public fiscal and credit injection into the economy makes no impression on the people whose reckless, unregulated behavior caused it, and whose bread is now buttered with its spoils.
- The Case For Elizabeth Warren
Please Support Evergreene Digest
