AIG

Just as Zero Hedge first suggested when we heard about the ridiculous idea that AIG wants to buy back the Maiden Lane II loans that were among those forcing the government to effectively nationalize the insolvent company, the Fed has rejected the less than arms-length offer, and instead is opening up the portfolio of toxic loans to popular bidding. That other investors will trickle in is great, yet it is merely another confirmation that all funds are once again scrambling after yield since nobody has any hope of seeing the loans through maturity, and is merely a ploy to capture a few basis points before the current credit bubble implodes. Luckily for taxpayers, the Fed is not paying AIG a fee of a few hundred million for what Benmosche would most certainly characterize as a "stalking horse" bid.

Put in your time at the Fed, then collect fat bonuses from the company you helped bailout. Nice work if you can get it.

When a bankrupt zombie company offers to purchase from the Fed the very instruments that put it in bankruptcy in the first place, and which the Fed was forced to put on US taxpayers in order to perpetuate the status quo farce, you know the words Banana republic don't even start to begin to express the describe the lunacy we live in.

From Reuters:

• Submits offer to buy all of rmbs owned by Maiden lane II for $15.7 billion
  in
  cash
• 
  If accepted, this offer will substantially reduce the amount of
  outstanding
  government assistance to AIG
  
• If accepted, offer will guarantee frbny earns a profit on its interest in
  Maiden lane II
  
• Says total outstanding assistance from U.S. government will be reduced by
  about $13 billion to total of about $26 billion
  
• Says conditions that necessitated Maiden lane II have been resolved

There was a time when everyone thought CDOs are perfectly safe. That ended up being a tad incorrect. It resulted in AIG blowing up, recording hundreds of billions in losses and almost taking the rest of the financial world with it, leading ultimately to the first iteration of quantitative easing. A few years thereafter, several blogs and fringe elements suggested that munis are the next major cataclysm and will likely require Fed bail outs (some time before Meredith Whitney came on the public scene with her apocalyptic call). It would be only fitting that the same AIG that blew up the world the first time around, end up being the same company that does so in 2011, and with an instrument that just like back then only an occasional voice warned is a weapon of mass destruction: municipal bonds. AIG dropped over 6% today following some very unpleasasnt disclosures about its muni outlook, and corporate liquidity implications arising therefrom: "American International Group Inc., the bailed-out insurer, said it faces increased risk of losses on its $46.6 billion municipal bond portfolio and that defaults could pressure the company’s liquidity." So how long before we discover that Goldman has been lifting every AIG CDS for the past quarter? And how much longer after that until someone leaks a document that the company's muni strategy was orchestrated by one Joe Cassano?

There was a time when everyone thought CDOs are perfectly safe. That ended up being a tad incorrect. It resulted in AIG blowing up, recording hundreds of billions in losses and almost taking the rest of the financial world with it, leading ultimately to the first iteration of quantitative easing. A few years thereafter, several blogs and fringe elements suggested that munis are the next major cataclysm and will likely require Fed bail outs (some time before Meredith Whitney came on the public scene with her apocalyptic call). It would be only fitting that the same AIG that blew up the world the first time around, end up being the same company that does so in 2011, and with an instrument that just like back then only an occasional voice warned is a weapon of mass destruction: municipal bonds. AIG dropped over 6% today following some very unpleasasnt disclosures about its muni outlook, and corporate liquidity implications arising therefrom: "American International Group Inc., the bailed-out insurer, said it faces increased risk of losses on its $46.6 billion municipal bond portfolio and that defaults could pressure the company’s liquidity." So how long before we discover that Goldman has been lifting every AIG CDS for the past quarter? And how much longer after that until someone leaks a document that the company's muni strategy was orchestrated by one Joe Cassano?

For those who have long been hoping to see AIG's Joe Cassano, the man who more than anyone let AIG become the risk behemoth it was when it blew up, end in jail, whether it was for massive fraud, or any other violation of justice, may be one step closer to the vindicaation. A discovery by David Fiderer today discloses that the former head of AIG's Financial Products group may have just purjured himself when previously, under oath, he said that AIG never took less than super senior tranches of CDOs it insured. It turns out that the firm was quite often double dipping lower in the risk stack and gobbling subordinate tranches alongside all the now insolvent European and Japanese banks, better known as "investors" in the Goldman rolodex of biggest morons in the world.

When it comes to AIG's liquidity crisis, Wall Street's conventional wisdom absolves Goldman from blame. Goldman's people, so the story goes, were smart and therefore prescient about the declining values of CDOs. So their demands for cash margin from AIG, which insured billions of toxic CDOs for Goldman's benefit, were legitimate. By contrast, AIG's people, the poster boys for financial incompetence, kept flailing about because they were in denial until everything reached a crisis point in September 2008. Yes Goldman was smart, and yes, the people at AIG were clueless, which is why Goldman could pull off such an audacious scam. Goldman's demands for margin were made in bad faith, and possibly under fraudulent pretenses. The conventional wisdom overlooks a critical point: The legal documents had no teeth and might have been impossible to enforce. The problems with the documents, in the context of the overall business deal, require a bit of explanation. But it's worthwhile to remember that all these deals are governed by two truisms: First, if you skip a step in analyzing a structured deal, you probably end up with the wrong answer. And second, almost everything about CDOs is kept secret in order to protect the guilty.

AIG has just announced it will use proceeds from the sale of AIA and ALICO to repay the New York Fed's credit facility. Expect to hear more spin of how the New York Fed is getting repaid by AIG (courtesy of money invested in AIG via TARP.). More importantly for shareholders, AIG also announces that it will have the right to: "raise up to $3 billion (and up to an additional $4 billion with the consent of the Treasury Department) by August 15, 2011 in a registered primary offering." Presumably this is less than the speculated offering discussed previously by the WSJ.

Rather than trying to achieve some illusory political game by moving forward with another pretend scheme for the disposal of the stake in AIG, a scheme dreamed up in a hasty and ill-considered fashion, Secretary Geithner and the White House should start with a small but very important step, namely to reorganize the public stakes in AIG and other firms now held by the Fed.

If forced liquidation becomes a pattern among US (and global) pension funds, watch out, the pension tsunami will have far reaching effects which will make the whole AIG fiasco look like a walk in the park...

Two few months ago we disclosed how the Illinois Teachers' Retirement System (TRS) was doing all it can to become the next AIG. In addition to, or maybe precisely due to, its deplorable fundamental condition, which can be summarized as being 61% underfunded on its $33.7 billion in assets, with a performance record of down $4.4 billion in 2009 and 5% in 2008, the fund, courtesy of a detailed analysis by Alexandra Harris of the Medill Journalism school at Northwestern, was found to be on its way to trying to become a veritable self-made TBTF: as was described then, "TRS is largely on the risky side of the contracts, selling and writing OTC derivatives, including credit default swaps, insurance-like contracts that guarantee payment in the event of a default." In other words, TRS was selling substantial amounts of derivatives, which held the fund's other assets as hostage in case the collateral calls started coming in, as should the market broadly decline, the value of the downside derivatives would "increase" and the seller (in this case TRS) would need to pledge ever more collateral against these wrong way bets. Not only that, but the Fund is currently getting annihilated on its curve exposure: "TRS appears to be betting that long-term Treasury yields will greatly increase" we wrote back then. So as a result of i) its massive underfunded fundamentals and ii) a bet that the market would turn bullish, i.e., spreads would drop (they are rising), and treasuries would plunge (we all know where they are today), which was supposed to happen by now but isn't as the economy is now officially double dipping, the fund has basically thrown in the towel and is proceeding with liquidations. The problem there is that due to its derivative exposure, liquidations now become self-reinforcing, as more cash needs to be pledged as collateral in a declining market, and the AIG death spiral we all know and love, follows. The only thing missing is for Goldman to raise its overnight variation margin requirements and it's game over, as we get a brand new AIG on our hands. And since Goldman is among the 60 or so asset managers that actually decide how the fund invests its meager assets, it is fully aware of its precarious position, and it is a sure bet that Goldman is currently deciding when to pull the plug on the TRS life support.

In today's NYT, Gretchen Morgenson does a good summary of how Goldman was demonstratively net short net short AIG (or net long its CDS, depending how one looks at it) via nearly 100 counterparties to the tune of just over $1.7 billion in net notional, after Chuck Grassley released several previously classified documents disclosing Goldman's CDS position as of September 15, 2008, the day of Lehman's bankruptcy. As Gretchen summarizes: "According to the document, Goldman held a total of $1.7 billion in insurance on A.I.G. from almost 90 institutions. Its exposure to A.I.G. at that time was $2.6 billion. Goldman bought most of the insurance from large foreign and domestic banks, including Credit Suisse ($310 million), Morgan Stanley ($243 million) and JPMorgan Chase ($216 million). Goldman also bought $223 million in insurance on A.I.G. from a variety of funds overseen by Pimco, the money management firm." While the topic of how the world's biggest asset management firm in the face of Pimco (and specifically its massive Total Return Fund) could have a net short CDS position (i.e., unlimited downside exposure), and how this is supposed to demonstrate prudent capital management, is ripe for evisceration, we will leave it for another day, as there is something more notable in the Grassley disclosure that has to be discussed. While Gretchen is correct that the external position of Goldman's exposure vis-a-vis AIG is indeed a total of $1.7 billion in long CDS, if one were to actually present the gross number, the truth would be starker: as the Grassley document reveals, the firm's gross exposure for its IG flow and structured finance desks goes from a positive $1.7 billion net exposure, to a ($2.9) billion net exposure, a massive $4.8 billion swing! What is it that in one fell swoop moved the firm from having a huge long bet on AIG, to a major short CDS position, one that nearly entirely covered the firm's $2.6 billion in legacy risk exposure? Enter Goldman's Counterparty Valuation Adjustment desk.

Goldman's David Viniar is currently being grilled in the second day of the FCIC's hearings by Brooksley Born, who is asking the smartest questions of the CFO we have ever heard on TV. The webcast can be seen here. The main question being hammered again and again is why and how did Goldman profit twice on AIG, first by being bailed out by taxpayers, when the firm received a par payout on its collateral exposure with the insurer, and secondly, and much more importantly, how and why the firm made a profit of $1.2 billion by buying and selling CDS on the insurer, which comports with Lloyd Blankfein's previous statement that the firm was fully insured against an AIG collapse. This is a topic Zero Hedge has covered since March of 2009. Much more important at this point is the tangent of the circumstances surrounding the AIG CDS sale: we harken back to our post from January 2010, titled "Did Goldman Sell Its $2.5 Billion AIG CDS While In Possession Of Material, Non-Public Information?" in which we speculated that not only did Goldman receive an unfair second profit via the CDS, but that in fact it sold this insurance while potentially in possession of material non-public information. Now that this topic has finally surfaced to the broader population, we would like to once again bring attention to it, and we hope Brooksley Born has a chance to follow up on it.

A little under two years ago, there was a big debate in the precious metals community, in which two groups of individuals were arguing for and against possible silver market manipulation, via arbing the COMEX and the OTC. On one hand you had such distinguished economists/bloggers as Mish (here and here) and Jon Nadler of Kitco (here) claiming there is no such thing as a COMEX-OTC arb because markets are ultimately efficient, and the second a trade is effected in one market, it implicitly affects all other markets, making spread arbing, and thus "manipulation" impossible. On the other hand, you had C.Loeb making precisely the opposite argument (here). After a brief flare up, the debate died down, with a partial win acceded to Nadler, who ended the debate with the following rhetorical statement: "Also, by the way, why not NAME the sinister manipulative banks in question? Why not ask them outright as to the motives behind their positions (or better yet, who their clients were) and whether or not they acted in a "willfully nefarious" manner? Conclusion: One can take any database and make it suit their conspiracy argument. That, however, does not make for proof of any kind." In other words, Mr. Nadler was asking for a bank to confirm it was arbing the COMEX-OTC spread, which in turn would unwind his defense argument, and lend credence to the claim that some players, due to their massive scale or otherwise, succeed in manipulating the silver (or gold) market by profitably spreading the legs of the trade in two completely different markets and arbing this spread. For the longest time people looked exclusively at JPMorgan for clues. Boy, were they wrong... and are they about to be surprised that in addition to almost blowing up the world, AIG FP has admitted that it itself, as the defacto risk mastodon and suicide bomber under Joe Cassano, with "$426 billion in total on and off balance sheet risk equivalent delta," was precisely just this spread manipulator. But don't take our word for it. Take AIG's.

Better late than never. FCIC also adds it has not received some information requested from Goldman.

Although what are the going to find - that Hank Paulson used taxpayer money to bail out the firm, even as Goldman was betting against AIG and made billions, was made whole on all its impaired AIG collateral, had insider information on the firm's holdings courtesy of its own CDO efforts, covered its AIG CDS while allegedly in possession of material nonpublic information, and made billions in 2007 by shorting housing? Yeah, we know all that. And the best line of the year - Did Goldman make markets or make "Pyramids" FCIC's Thomas says.