Frustation For the Day

There's a headline today on Bloomber titled "AIG Told U.S. Failure May Cripple Banks, Money Funds" that should stir up any tax payer anger toward the recklessness of our policy makers who managed to use our hard-earned cash to pay for AIG's obligations to firm such as Goldman Sachs. The below came from the article

Bailout Beneficiaries
New York Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo said at a March 5 hearing he’d received the presentation.

The document doesn’t say which other companies have benefited from AIG’s repeated rescues. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG were among at least two dozen financial institutions that were paid $50 billion from the bailout funds received by AIG, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a confidential document and people familiar with the matter whom it didn’t identify.

Goldman and Deutsche got about $6 billion each between September and December, the Journal said. Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC Holdings Plc were other counterparties that also received payments, the newspaper said, citing the document.

Taxpayer Wipeout
AIG’s presentation said that without more U.S. help, investment losses would mean “AIG will not be able to repay its obligations” and that cash previously provided by the U.S., which controls a 79.9 percent stake in the insurer, could be lost. Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy, who took over the top job in September, has vowed that AIG will repay all of its debts to taxpayers.

At AIG itself, failure could have led to dismissals from its workforce of 116,000, the document said. At that level, the staff is unchanged from the end of 2007 before AIG’s bailout. The global credit crunch has led to at least 284,000 job cuts at the rest of the world’s financial companies, according to Bloomberg data.

The insurer’s first bailout package, crafted last September, later grew to $150 billion. After failing to sell enough subsidiaries to repay the government, AIG had to turn to U.S. taxpayers again. The company may need more support if financial markets don’t improve, the Treasury and Federal Reserve said last week in a joint statement.

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