AIG has not even been accused of any crimes.
Words mean things, and you should be aware that YOUR credibility, on these threads, depends on using words with some degree of care.
Yes, some people at AIG did some dumb things -— but again, the financial melt down was caused by sub-prime mortgages, sub-prime mortgages were pretty much INVENTED by Democrats.
The AIG problem was created by Credit Default Swaps on bad mortgages.
Credit Default Swaps, which would not be possible, had not the Democrats INVENTED, and REQUIRED the sub prime mortgages, in the first place!
Origination.
This mess was started at mortgage origination!
The melt down and the sub-prime was a result of Carter, Clinton. Lesser Bush, Todd, Kennedy, Frank and all of those told the banks to issue loans to those who couldn’t afford them.
It seems to me if you are an insurance business, you have a keen understanding of the need to maintain reserves against losses. In this context, one could reserve by making bets on both sides, so to speak. It would take staggering incompetence to make all your bets on one side.
There is a point at which the assertion of incompetence begins to lose credibility against the smell of fraud. Beyond the one-sided bets are all sorts of accounting mechanisms that concealed real losses from investors for years. These accounting mechanisms are also part and parcel of the fraud. The slow deterioration of business conditions does not cause a stock to fall from $50/share to $0.33/share in less than a year. What causes drops like that is that people discover a truth that has been concealed: the financial condition of AIG was not as previously portrayed.
It the great mistake of most who labor toward a Free Republic to confuse stupidity with evil. Wall Street is rotten to the core, though the rot starts at the head: the Federal Reserve and its ongoing manipulation of the markets.
I should add that your assumption that AIG’s problems are rooted in bad mortages is not correct; the most significant problems came from “super senior multi-sector” CDSs. Indeed, on February 11, 2008, AIG said in an 8-K filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that PriceWaterhouseCoopers, its independent auditor, has determined that the company had a “material weakness” in its internal controls over financial reporting relating to how it estimates the fair value of the super senior credit default swap portfolio of AIG Financial Products Corp. This group of CDSs, I think, brought about the rescue by September 2008.