Nearly two years later, taxpayers are on the hook for twice that amount, and it now appears that Paulson and senior Federal Reserve officials either plunged ahead without understanding AIG’s financial situation and the risks it posed to taxpayers — or were less than candid about one of the largest corporate bailouts in U.S. history.
AIG was at the epicenter of all the government bailouts of financial institutions in 2008, a company through which more than $90 billion in federal money flowed out the back door to some of the same Wall Street banks whose risky behavior fueled the crisis. Among the leading beneficiaries of the AIG bailout was investment banking giant Goldman Sachs, which Paulson headed until June 2006.
Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel that’s tracking the use of bailout money, said at a hearing in late May that the government “broke all the rules” with its rescue of AIG, which she labeled a “corporate Frankenstein” that defied regulatory oversight.
Despite the regulators’ public assurances and AIG’s assertion that pooling arrangements among its subsidiaries made the liabilities look worse than they actually were, AIG has since propped up its insurance subsidiaries with $31 billion of taxpayers’ dollars, and its total debt to taxpayers — once as much as $182 billion — still could reach $162.5 billion.
Now the company, nearly 80 percent owned by taxpayers, is reporting profits again and appears to have stabilized. Even before AIG’s planned $35.5 billion sale of a prized Asian insurance subsidiary collapsed on June 1, however, government auditors projected that bailing it out will still cost taxpayers as much as $47 billion.
It goes on from there, once again McClatchy News Service Does a great job of exposing the truth. In this case essentially a Ponzi scheme that got bailed out by either a clueless Hank Paulson and or Timothy Geithner or at worst criminal activities committed by then Treasury Secretary Paulson and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner. I don’t think Geithner is that smart and he may well have been clueless, Paulson on the other hand certainly isn’t.
The whole story and a video can be found here:
AIG’s problems far greater than Bush officials told public
Hi and welcome to The Profit Motive, I’m your host Caleb Lawrence. Once upon a time in America the media acted as the watchdog of the corporations and the state. In the modern era it’s all about ratings and profits, opinion has been substituted for news and frequently is presented as fact. 
