rulemylife
Posts: 14614
Joined: 8/23/2004 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BadJezebel Hold on a second, Folks. Let's take a look at these bailouts: What they're about and why we need them. (I hope that someone who really knows about all of this will help me out on the subject, I'm not professing to be an expert by ANY means.) Let’s consider the example of AIG, the world's largest insurer: they have over 100,000 employees and their failure could shake the world's markets. If those markets are in precarious positions already, they could potentially falter. That could be disastrous everywhere. What the media has most believing is that AIG lost so much money and the government had to give them between 70 and 80 Billion dollars to continue to operate. What actually happened is that AIG over the last few quarters had to write-off losses due to the sub-prime lending market. These are not actual losses and theoretically, if everyone paid back their mortgages and other loans these losses would never be realized. Anyway, AIG, among others had to write off these potential losses. Insurance companies, in order to be allowed to operate have to have a certain percentage of money in the case that catastrophe hits and they need to pay out an insane number of claims all at once. AIG, has plenty in assets to cover this but, it isn't all in cash. To even out their balance sheet, they needed a 20 Billion dollar bridge but because of old regulations, they couldn't loan themselves the money. Overnight, while the government was making the decision to allow them to loan themselves money, credit rating companies, like Moody's downgraded their credit so instead of needing to have a 20 billion dollar safety net, all of the sudden, overnight, they needed 80. So what the government did was give them a line of credit, NOT a check of 80 billion or so. AIG may never need it: First, if there are no catastrophes between now and when they can sell some of their assets (like real estate and subsidiaries that are not focused on their main lines of business), they can sure up their balance books w/o touching the money. Second, most AIG companies are financially secure. It's the holding company that is suffering. I'm no expert either, but from my understanding it was a direct loan in exchange for 80% equity in AIG. So, basically the government is now the controlling interest. AIG didn't have the cash, if they did this would not have happened. They were the major company in credit swap default lines. Which, from my understanding, means they were an insurer for lending institutions against businesses that defaulted on their loans. Without such insurance the lending instititions refused to extend further credit thereby freezing the financial markets unless action was taken by the government. It was necessary for the government to react, otherwise the economy would basically have ground to a halt. The question is why it was allowed reach the point that this happened.
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