AIG's reported loss of 62 billion dollars yesterday, the biggest quarterly loss in Corporate history, after an infusion of a $60 billion dollar bailout loan, a $40 billion purchase of preferred shares, $40 billion to soak up its toxic assets and another $30 billion on top of that ~ is all related to derivative contracts. AIG has used derivative contracts to guarantee complex debt securities on the books of many shaky financial institutions. If AIG defaults on its debt ~ which is now a staggering $180 billion ( equivalent to nearly half the U.S. governments entire budget deficit for all of 2008 ) the whole financial system would crumble so the Fed agrees to another $30 Billion bailout and delays the inevitable shake out.
Hahaha
Can you explain who won 62 billion dollars yesterday if AIG lost it?
Washington is not afraid of this. Obama can’t wait for an entire economic collapse so he can remake America in his Marxist image.
Derivatives are economically neutral. They are zero sum. They can neither boost nor crash an economy.
They simply move money between winners and losers. Same money. No net gain to the wider economy. No net loss.
Nobody touches my third leg, unless I pay $10.
I suspect the the credit card phase of all this is just getting started, and mortages are entering their 2nd phase.
Defaults are spreading as jobs disappear in the Obamcomony.
Revealed: the geniuses heading up the world’s largest financial companies were a bunch of irresponsible, greedy scum who didn’t care that they were very possibly going to wreck the world economic system, so long as they got their bonuses.
I say, put them in pillories in full public display where those who lost their savings are free to beat them and humiliate them as they see fit.
Credit Default Swaps are a scam so big and so insane that even PT Barnum would have run away from them.