A.I.G. Bailout, Revisionists’ Version
Maurice R. Greenberg, A.I.G.’s former chief and a large shareholder, has spun a ludicrous tale in court that the bailout of the insurer was unfair to its investors.
Was the bailout of the American International Group by the government punitive? Was it confiscatory?
Of course it was, on both counts. It was supposed to be.
Somehow, Maurice R. Greenberg, A.I.G.’s former chief executive and a large shareholder through his firm Starr International, has spun a ludicrous tale in open court in Washington that the bailout of the insurer was unfair to its investors.
What is more worrying, this lawsuit increasingly appears to be gaining support from a phalanx of Wall Street financiers and commentators, who have managed to use the case to rewrite history so that A.I.G. can be viewed as a sympathetic casualty of the crisis and one that was mistreated by the big bad government, which sought more onerous terms from A.I.G. than it did from many of the banks that also received bailouts.
Even the writer Noam Scheiber, whom I have long read with admiration, contended in a recent Op-Ed article in The New York Times that “as asinine as the Starr suit may be in legal terms, it may end up serving a constructive purpose.”
The government sought to save A.I.G. for only one reason: because it was “systemically important,” which is not-so-hard-to-decipher code for a company whose failure would have had a ripple effect on large swaths of the industry — in this case, dozens of banks.
The government never sought to couch A.I.G.’s lifeline as a way to push money into the hands of Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale and the dozens of other banks around the world that were the beneficiaries.
Source: NYT- A.I.G. Bailout, Revisionists’ Version
