Goldman Sachs wants share of AIG's bailout money
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
A Goldman Sachs executive on Thursday told a panel examining the causes of the financial crisis that the company had no regrets about collecting billions of dollars in taxpayer money for correctly predicting the collapse of the U.S. housing market.
Goldman was entitled to be paid $12.9 billion out of the
$182 billion bailout that American International Group received in one of the largest federal rescues, and Goldman Chief Financial Officer David Viniar said the government had an obligation to honor AIG's full debts.
"The government stepped into AIG's shoes" and therefore had to honor its contract with Goldman, Viniar told the congressionally appointed panel.
Members of the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission said they couldn't understand how Goldman could take the full amount AIG owes, knowing that U.S. taxpayers were picking up the tab at the onset of the worst recession since the 1930s.
"You were 100 percent recompensed on that deal, and the only people who were out money were the American public," said panel member Brooksley Born, who headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the late 1990s.
The government "paid 100 cents on the dollar for something that was going for 48 cents at the time," said Bill Thomas, the panel's Republican vice chairman and a former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.
The panel probed Goldman's actions during a second day of hearings examining the company's relationship with AIG and how both companies' derivatives trading helped push the country into financial distress.
AIG sold billions of dollars of credit-default swaps, guarantees on mortgage securities that ended up forcing the company to pay out billions of dollars after the subprime mortgage bubble burst in 2007.
Goldman profited from its bets against the housing market before the crisis, and its derivatives dealings have drawn harsh scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers. It continued to reap profits after accepting federal bailout money and other government subsidies.
In a previously disclosed 2007 e-mail, Viniar indicated that Goldman made more than $50 million in one day on bets that the housing market would founder. Viniar and other executives also discussed a dispute between Goldman and AIG in 2007-2008 over the amount of collateral that AIG needed to put up because of the plummeting value of the mortgage securities it insured.
During the hearing, Goldman executives defended the lower values they placed on transactions with AIG, resisting suggestions that Goldman's demands for increased collateral from AIG helped push the company to the brink of collapse.
