The Story of AIG's disintegration was the cover story of Fortune magazine's

[Mike 03]

October 13, 2008 edition: "AIG's Risky Business: Hank Greenberg built an empire that dominated Wall Street until it came crashing down. The Inside Story." A second, more important, story in this same issue (a companion piece, in a sense) is "The $55 Trillion Time Bomb: Will Credit Default Swaps Blow Up?" Unfortunately you may have to pay to access this, or visit your local library. But there's nothing here that is not available on Wiki, plus a little bit of internet sleuthing.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2008/10/13/toc.html



I watched the hearing today and was ashamed at the amount of ignorance I saw about the cause of AIG's implosion. You could tell many (NOT ALL) of the congressional members had not even bothered to Google "AIG", "Credit default swaps", "Edward Liddy," or read the material they had been provided about how the AIGFP worked, who had been fired after the debacle, and why it was necessary to unwind this leverage in an orderly way.

And they called a straw man to testify and take the brunt of the criticism instead of the actual villains in this scenario.

These hearings lately are nothing more than humiliating circuses. Today we got to hear the same four or five questions asked thirty times over a period of nearly seven hours, and half of the time the politicians asking the questions didn't seem to understand the answers anyway--you could tell this from the followup questions they asked that had nothing to do with anything or totally contradicted what they had just been told.

The crooks are never called to testify at these crucial hearings, just the "janitors," the cleanup guys, to use a metaphor from the movie "Michael Clayton."

A serious inquiry into the failure of AIG would encompass a board with these panelists:

HANK GREENBERG

MARTIN SULLIVAN

JOE CASSANO, head of AIGFP (Especially this S.O.B. He is the most important witness of all, IMO, and most people who consider themselves experts on the AIG situation don't even know his fucking name.)

It's so embarrassing to watch these committees rip apart the people who are trying to stop the hemorrhaging of our financial system.

My vote for biggest embarrassment of the day--to my horror--was a Democrat named Stephen Lynch. The guy had clearly not even watched the hearings or testimony, and if he had he was too intellectually deficient to comprehend what he was observing. But then that could be said for about 80% of the people on this committee. Fucking embarrassing. We need to start putting people who know something about the subjects they are investigating in charge of investigating them--novel concept!

Vent over.