AIG's Small London Office May Have Lost $500B

ABC News ^ | March 10, 2009 | Jay Taylor, Lauren Pearle and Tina Babarovic

[CutePuppy]

Feds, Brits Probe AIG's London Office on $500B Losses

Ground zero for AIG's spectacular implosion, which has soaked up more federal bailout money than any other entity, appears to have been a small London branch office that may have lost nearly half a trillion dollars in bad deals.

The disastrous deals were built up in a decade and, when the crisis hit, the man who ran the unit for the last eight years retired after making $280 million for himself and leaving with a $1 million-a-month consulting contract.

The struggling New York-based insurance giant has avoided collapse with the massive infusion of $160 billion in taxpayer money. The U.S. government has agreed to prop up AIG because it fears that AIG has such extensive financial involvement around the world that its failure would be far more costly.

Britain's serious fraud office and U.S. regulators are combing through the records of AIG's Financial Products Group, formerly located on the fifth floor of an office building in London's Mayfair section.

The unit's small group of traders risked nearly half a trillion dollars to insure U.S. mortgages and other debt using complex financial products called credit default swaps, according to recent congressional testimony.

"AIG Financial Products was the core, the hottest point of the global financial crisis," freelance investigative reporter Peter Koenig told "Good Morning America" today. "It was the epicenter."

The group's traders "found a crack in the system that was unregulated," Koenig told "GMA."

Joseph Cassano, an American who ran the group for eight years, declined through his lawyer to talk with ABC News. But ABC News obtained a tape of Cassano from August 2007 telling investors just how confident he was.

.....

[mewzilla]

An FR thread from '08, mentions Cassano....

Man who destroyed AIG an Obama-Dodd man [semi-vanity]

[dennisw]

Needs to be confirmed I think I read that part of the reason AIG liked CDS being written in its London office is that the UK was even more hands off that the USA for such derivatives operations

UK is very serious about “The City” and London being the capital of international finance. So I would not be surprised if this were true

[nyconse]

Britain can kiss my fanny...there is a reason why AIG left the US and located in England...they could not engage in their risky behavior here...there were not enough regulations but but there were some. They wanted to make sure the US could not impede their risky strategy in any way...no worries in Britain apparently. Really, AIG crashed the world economy with their CDS mess with Britain’s help. We could just as easily blame the UK.

[Moonman62]

Joe Cassano at AIGFP London office thought he had invented a money printing press in the form of CDSs...

He did, and so did a lot of others. Theses things should have been regulated, and corporate management should have known the risks, regardless.

[Winniesboy]

It's pretty funny how quickly some Brits, who are so quick to brag about any connection, however tenuous, to any good thing on the planet, are even quicker at distancing themselves from any part in a disaster.

If you substituted 'some Americans' for 'some Brits' in that sentence wouldn't it be equally true? Or indeed some citizens of a good few other countries...Isn't it a pretty well universal, and on the whole fairly harmless characteristic in countries with any pretensions to extensive international influence?

[dirtboy]

The group's traders "found a crack in the system that was unregulated," Koenig told "GMA."

Crack? By design, credit default swaps were unregulated (thanks for nothing, Phil Gramm). By design, they were set up to be a time bomb for European banks, who were allowed to purchase credit default swaps in lieu of reserves.

There was nothing sneaky about it.

[Moltke]

The disastrous deals were built up in a decade and, when the crisis hit, the man who ran the unit for the last eight years retired after making $280 million for himself and leaving with a $1 million-a-month consulting contract.

Those $280 million should come with $280 million worth of culpability.

[tcrlaf]

“Architects of AIG collapse were in London (Daily Mail 21 September 2008)
AIG trail leads to London ‘casino’ (Daily Telegraph 18 Oct 2008 - and, no, it wasn’t A E-P)”

US MEdia couldn’t admit that Democrats were neck-deep in all of this until Obama was elected.

EVERYWHERE WE LOOK in to the financial crisis, we see DEMOCRATS, or big Democrat financiers!!!