And the circle is complete. Tim Geithner’s first post-Treasury Secretary job will be as a “distinguished fellow” at the Council On Foreign Relations. For the uninitiated, the Council On Foreign Relations is a more or less open conspiracy to use the American government as a vessel for advancing Big Business’ interests abroad. CFR represents America’s [...]

Thanks but no thanks? After AIG’s Ad blitz thanking America for letting them raid the treasury the company made another announcement: AIG is considering Wednesday whether the company should join a lawsuit against the government that spent $182 billion to save it from collapse. American International Group Inc. said its board of directors will weigh [...]

In what borders on performance art, AIG is launching a public relations campaign to thank American taxpayers for letting them extort bailout money from Congress.

Four years after taking over the troubled insurance giant AIG, the US will sell its majority stake in the company in an $18 billion deal that appears to be more symbolic than anything. The sale will mark a step that seemed hard to imagine four years ago, when the New York insurer was effectively nationalized [...]

As more becomes known about JPMorgan Chase’s Fail Whale trade, we learn that the Chief Investment Office, where the trades were placed, was the most dysfunctional trading desk this side of AIG’s Financial Products Unit. Early success turned it from an office that was supposed to be hedging risk into a profit center. And this [...]

Elizabeth Warren, running for Senate in Massachusetts, today called attention to a stealth bailout of AIG through special tax breaks created for them and other bailed-out companies. Warren joined a bipartisan group of her former colleagues on the Congressional Oversight Panel, the group that oversaw TARP, to assail the tax preferences for AIG, and demand [...]

Here’s a story that shows the power of pressure on even the loftiest of our financial overlords: Stephen Hester, head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, gave way to heavy political pressure last night to forego his £963,000 bonus. The final straw for the RBS chief executive appears to have been the looming threat of [...]

The AIG-Bank of America lawsuit over mortgage backed securities fills me with the least rooting interest of any possible lawsuit. For me it’s like watching Notre Dame play Ohio State. I don’t really care who wins. But that AIG lawsuit was critical to the larger mortgage mess. For the first time, an investor in mortgage [...]

I guess news outlets are still pushing the line that the S&P debt downgrade is what has driven the stock market volatility over the past week or so. They have to neglect that the market was falling before the downgrade to come up with this rationale, but no matter, I guess. In planet reality, there [...]

Bank of America was just getting over having the New York Attorney General step in on their settlement with Countrywide investors over mortgage bonds, when Delaware’s AG decided to join in. Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden also intends to intervene in the Bank of America case, Ian McConnel, a deputy attorney general at the office, [...]

A lot of people are talking about this report about how Goldman Sachs got an additional, undisclosed $2.9 billion from AIG that it promptly deposited into its own account. This is significant because previously, Goldman’s line was that they took billions in counterparty payments from AIG on behalf of its clients. But this reveals something [...]