Don’t say AIG never put anything in your wallets, taxpayers! The company just sold its Taiwanese securities unit to the Bank of East Asia, for something between ten and twenty million dollars, or between five and nine retention bonuses. Which brings us to the latest twist in the ongoing mystery of America’s great black-scholes hole: why is it taking so long to sell off the pieces? Surely the rest of the company’s units couldn’t be as toxic as the one that had Joe Cassano in charge! Or could they? On Tuesday Ben Bernanke let it slip to Congress that had AIG Financial Products been allowed to bust, its bread-and-butter insurance businesses might have folded as well — so buried were their balance sheets in lethal “products.”
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=144520