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We still don’t know why the Federal Reserve paid 100 cents on the dollar to the counterparties of AIG... the mystery is another mark against the “too big to fail” banks and their closely woven interconnection with the Federal Reserve …
Bloomberg reminds us of a comparable closeout of a swaps transaction around the same time that was paid off with a haircut…
~~~”...Citigroup Inc. agreed last year to accept about 60 cents on the dollar from New York-based bond insurer Ambac Financial Group Inc. to retire protection on a $1.4 billion CDO...” ~~~
The decisions about haircutting AIG’s counterparties was made by then President of the NY Fed, Tim Geithner. Again from Bloomberg…
~~~ “…Beginning late in the week of Nov. 3, [2008] the New York Fed, led by President Timothy Geithner, took over negotiations with the banks from AIG, together with the Treasury Department and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Geithner’s team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps — insurance-like contracts that backed soured collateralized-debt obligations…
…Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public. The New York Fed’s decision to pay the banks in full cost AIG — and thus American taxpayers — at least $13 billion. That’s 40 percent of the $32.5 billion AIG paid to retire the swaps. Under the agreement, the government and its taxpayers became owners of the dubious CDOs, whose face value was $62 billion and for which AIG paid the market price of $29.6 billion. The CDOs were shunted into a Fed-run entity called Maiden Lane III…”~~~
I think it would be useful for Congress, the courts and other overseers to make the circumstances of these enormous payments to Goldman Sachs and foreign banks public prior to writing new legislation for the ”too big to fail” banks.
The preview of the terms of Chairman Frank’s proposed bill will not be sufficient to “resolve” these problems for these concentrated, highly levered institutions. And more especially to stop these kinds of “herd” like liquidity problems where all the Wall Street firms have on the same bet… legislation that “resolves” these problems after the fact will not create stability… Wall Street will run amok again … don’t you think?
Stability cannot cleaned up after the fact… in 1998 the Wall Street dealers were forced by the New York Fed to stabilize Long Term Capital Management who they had all lent money to … a one time success story?… or a template for how America will deal with the instability that Wall Street imposes on our financial system?
Capital and Wall Street power is too concentrated to use this as an effective triage… the numbers are trillions of dollars now… who would backstop Bank of America/Merrill Lynch or JP Morgan Chase if we got into a derivatives collapse?
How much can the American public bear?