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AIG IS TIP OF DERIVATIVE ICEBERG
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No wonder the AIG execs want their Bonuses ~ their ship is floundering and they want to cash out before it sinks. The Obama administration refuses to face the reality that over 1.6 trillion dollars in AIG Derivative debt is still unpaid ~ which dwarfs the $170 billion in loans from taxpayers : Allen L Roland
Well, guess what ~ we're there !
Forget the bonuses ~ the real scandal of AIG is not that it can't repay its loans of over 170 Billion with over 1.6 Trillion dollars
in derivative debt still unpaid ~ as the GAO recently announced ~
The real scandal is that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars!
Want to know who these counterparties are? Elliott Spitzer blows the whistle on this ongoing scam and it's the usual cast of suspects.
" Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?
For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already...It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure." http://www.truthout.org/031809R
If you're not outraged, you're on life support.
Allen L Roland
Freelance Alternative Press Online columnist and psychotherapist Allen L Roland is available for comments, interviews, speaking engagements and private consultations ( allen@allenroland.com )
Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on www.conscioustalk.net
Cartoon courtesy of Tom Toles / Washington Post
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