Free Republic

The Boom-Time Bums These operators capitalized on regulatory gaps and used financial gimmicks to engineer quick profits and inflate share prices. Then they cashed out—leaving the rest of us with the bill. Among the notables: * Joe Cassano As president of AIG's financial products division, Cassano pioneered the insurance giant's sale of credit-default swaps, which allowed investors to buy insurance on packages of risky subprime loans they didn't even own. In one 2007 investor conference call, Cassano boasted that "it is hard for us … to even see a scenario that would see us losing one dollar in any of...

SO maybe Eliot Spitzer did kill AIG, after all. Nobody doubts the in surance giant is basically kaput, or that the promix ate cause is billions in losses in obscure instruments known as credit-default swaps, or CDSs. But American International Group didn't go deadly deep into CDSs until after New York Attorney General Spitzer had forced out Maurice "Hank" Greenberg out as CEO. GO back to March 2005, just days after Spitzer scored his biggest scalp during his eight-year tenure as the Sheriff of Wall Street by compelling Greenberg's departure. The new CEO, long-time AIG executive Martin Sullivan, held an...

SO maybe Eliot Spitzer did kill AIG, after all. Nobody doubts the in surance giant is basically kaput, or that the promix ate cause is billions in losses in obscure instruments known as credit-default swaps, or CDSs. But American International Group didn't go deadly deep into CDSs until after New York Attorney General Spitzer had forced out Maurice "Hank" Greenberg out as CEO. GO back to March 2005, just days after Spitzer scored his biggest scalp during his eight-year tenure as the Sheriff of Wall Street by compelling Greenberg's departure. The new CEO, long-time AIG executive Martin Sullivan, held an...

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...