Balkinization  

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

What's the Law of the A.I.G. Loan?

Marty Lederman

The Federal Reserve Board has authorized the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to lend up to $85 billion to the American International Group (AIG). The New York Times reports that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the Fed chairman Ben S. Bernanke convened a meeting with House and Senate leaders on Capitol Hill this evening to "explain" the rescue plan, but they did not request any new statutory authority for the bailout.

Matt Yglesias is understandably "a little surprised to learn that this is legal without some kind of legislation."

But according to the Fed, there already is such legislation, namely, the Federal Reserve Act of 1932, section 13(3) of which provides:

In unusual and exigent circumstances, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, by the affirmative vote of not less than five members, may authorize any Federal reserve bank, during such periods as the said board may determine, at rates established in accordance with the provisions of section 14, subdivision (d), of this Act, to discount for any individual, partnership, or corporation, notes, drafts, and bills of exchange when such notes, drafts, and bills of exchange are indorsed or otherwise secured to the satisfaction of the Federal Reserve bank: Provided, That before discounting any such note, draft, or bill of exchange for an individual, partnership, or corporation the Federal reserve bank shall obtain evidence that such individual, partnership, or corporation is unable to secure adequate credit accommodations from other banking institutions. All such discounts for individuals, partnerships, or corporations shall be subject to such limitations, restrictions, and regulations as the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System may prescribe.
As today's decision demonstrates, this New Deal law apparently gives an extraordinarily broad authority to the Fed to "discount" notes, drafts, and bills of exchange, without limit. Recall also, unitary executive fans, that the Fed could have made this loan over the objection of the President, although in this case the Treasury supports the Fed's decision.

UPDATE: David Zaring wonders, not about the legal basis for the loan, but about the legality of the conditions the Fed is imposing on A.I.G. According to the Fed:
The interests of taxpayers are protected by key terms of the loan. The loan is collateralized by all the assets of AIG, and of its primary non-regulated subsidiaries. These assets include the stock of substantially all of the regulated subsidiaries. The loan is expected to be repaid from the proceeds of the sale of the firm’s assets. The U.S. government will receive a 79.9 percent equity interest in AIG and has the right to veto the payment of dividends to common and preferred shareholders.
Zaring asks: Loan authority, sure. But from where does the Fed get the authority to trade credit for equity? I would think that it is implicit in the statutory loan authorization that the Fed can insist on collateral in order to protect the taxpayers' interest -- and this is simply a dramatic example of such collateral, necessitated by the enormity of the loan itself. I am not at all familiar, however, with this statute or the way it has been construed and implemented for 75 years, so that's simply a guess.

Thoughts?

Comments:

Why should anyone be surprised?

The New Deal court rewrote the Constitution to allow Congress to transfer a great deal of its legislative power to an unelected bureaucracy to avoid having to justify enacting the resulting laws to the voters or subjecting them to the President's veto.

This is the result.

I am so glad we elected the Fed to lend out tens of billions of our tax dollars and guarantee hundreds of billions more to bail out negligent financiers.
 

Smells like constitutional dictatorship to me. But in all seriousness, as a Schmittian of sorts I'm all for the use of emergency power in situations where we're at risk of worldwide financial crisis. Though 'unusual and exigent circumstances' isn't very strong or limiting language.
 

Word on the street is that there should be statutory limits on market share beyond which a business becomes "too big to fail." Huge companies are a single point of failure for the economy.

There, I said it.
 

"Bart" DePalma:

The New Deal court rewrote the Constitution to allow Congress to transfer a great deal of its legislative power to an unelected bureaucracy to avoid having to justify enacting the resulting laws to the voters or subjecting them to the President's veto.

This is the result.

I am so glad we elected the Fed to lend out tens of billions of our tax dollars and guarantee hundreds of billions more to bail out negligent financiers.


Sounds a bit like an effort to allow the gummint to bail out banks and companies at risk of going under, in the wake of market implosions, bank runs, and such. Passed in light of the wonderful success of the "free market" in 1929, I'm sure.

Yes, one may say that it's not the gummint's business to haul people's a$$es out of the fire when there's a single failure, but I think the idea is to keep the whole damn country from going to the toilet in a massive chain-reaction collapse and depression. Is AIG such a case? I dunno. Should the feds regulate more to prevent such "free market" excesses in the first place? Probably. But hard to complain about the gummint response without recognising that the failure here is of the private company ... and the vaunted "free market". If "free markets" are truly efficient, robust, and fair, no company ought to kick the bucket.

If we truly want to punish the "negligent financiers", we shouldn't let them walk off with massive severances and no jail time, sticking it to the investors instead. That might be the deterrence against further bad behaviour.

Cheers,
 

Eric, where would, say, Microsoft fit into that picture?
 

Texas three-step:

GUNS, BUTTER AND TAX CUTS!
 

tray,

Don't let Eric monopolize this thread.

But in any case, yes, the market "consolidation" has created single company failure points in the less than perfectly regulated "free" market. Especially when the upper management ranks can "pursue" benefits to the company that incidentally reward them hugely.

I saw in one econ blog that Freddie/Fannie bonuses over the past two years (or more) were going to be reviewed, such that bonuses for activities that helped lead to the downfall may be rescinded for fraud. This would be at the upper management level, as they have already notified the ousted CEOs that their severance packages will be contested.

I believe that's the least penalty that should be assessed for receiving a government bailout for running a financial infrastructure fail point into the ground.
 

This is certainly the first time I've been accused of monopolizing a thread!

That said, I think we agree. What I'm wondering about is the possibility for the system to have a statutory understanding (so to speak) of "point of failure," perhaps similar to mechanism of Most Favored Nation status. This would constitute a corporate "duty of care" as I see it.
 

Well, readers, I'm very pleased to see that the Administration realised the impact the collapse of AIG would have had on the financial system and has at the 11th hour effectively nationalised the corporation.

Bart in his ignorance said on the previous thread:-

"I am proposing stripping the Fed and the rest of the bureaucracy of their power to legislate corporate welfare like the bailouts of AIG, Freddie, Fannie, et al without being answerable to the voters and return that power to your elected Dem Congress where it belongs."

In fact, the powers which have been used overnight are those of the Federal Reserve Act 1932 enacted during the Great Depression to keep the US financial system functioning. It's not exactly new legislation - it has stood the test of time. The Governors of the Federal Reserve system are not exactly wild-eyed liberals - they are conservative bankers and lawyers - who know a crisis when it is staring them in the face.

AIG would not be getting an $85bn bail-out loan with what is effectively tax-payer money (in return for an 80% public stake in the corporation - effectively nationalisation) from these people if there were no crisis.

And so we go back to Roosevelt's Inaugural Address 4 Mar 1933 which I cited at the beginning of the previous thread:

"Practices of the unscrupulous money changers' stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.... In our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency."

Both the Clinton and the Bush Administrations have to take their share of blame for the dismantling of the regulatory system and the failure to modernise it. But the Congress too - and as Arne points out the two worst pieces of legislation were actually the handiwork of Senator Phil Gramm:

"Gramm orchestrated the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 which “destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies.” He also pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000, which made legal “the mortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector.”

It is the latter piece of legislation which created the wholly deregulated derivatives market which has brought the entire financial system to its knees.

The USA has been to the very edge of the precipice - the Fed looked over into the pit below and knew it had to act.

Bart should be down on his knees thanking the wisdom of those who created the New Deal legislation. Because of them, Bart can still write a cheque this morning in the expectation it will be paid, his credit cards will continue to work, his insurance policies will be honoured and his retirement investments will still have some worth at maturity. There will still be clients who can afford to pay for his services.

But that does not mean that there is not going to be some years of pain during the workout of these major problems - for which Bush and his cronies - including McCain and his coterie of laissez faire advisers - should be held responsible by the electorate.

And what remedy does the McCain camp propose: A Commission of Enquiry! For heaven's sake..a "don't commit yourself....committee yourself" response.

What is needed is new legislation with very firm regulation with a single financial services regulator. Senator Schumer and Mayor Bloomberg's 2007 Report had some sensible proposals to protect the health of New York as a primary financial services centre
Schumber-Bloomberg Report
- its worth a read. It might also be worth taking a look at how London regulation works:

Financial Services Authority
 

"It's not exactly new legislation - it has stood the test of time."

Since the legal community has a general rule that mistakes, if they're allowed to stand a while, should be preserved rather than corrected, the fact that legislation is long-standing isn't really much evidence of it's constitutionality. Especially in the case of New Deal legislation, where the critical tenure was gained during a period where the Supreme court had retired from striking down unconstitutional laws.

In short, "But it's a New Deal law!" isn't much of a defense when somebody claims a law is unconstitutional. Though it's a pretty good argument when somebody claims the courts won't care if it's unconstitutional...
 

the fact that legislation is long-standing isn't really much evidence of it's constitutionality.

Here's a corollary, Brett: The fact that legislation helped usher in the greatest, mostly broadly shared economic expansion in history does constitute evidence that constitutionality may--in some cases--be overrated.

Or maybe you don't see a benefit to society from a large & thriving middle class. (?)
 

I did not argue that the government should not provide assistance to business in cases of true emergency, but rather that this decision should be made by our elected representatives and not pawned off on unaccountable bureaucrats.

Pawning this off on the Fed is analogous to Sandy's favorite historical citation to the Romans choosing dictators to deal with crises.
 

On the constitutionality issue:-

I do not pretend to have the expertise of some learned American contributers to this blog. What I do know is that the Founding Fathers would have been very well aware of the value of sound money and a properly regulated financial system.

After all they had just seen the effects of the first market crash of the modern era: The South Sea Bubble

I would have thought that the Section 8 powers of the Congress to legislate for the general welfare and provide for regulation of foreign and interstate commerce were quite sufficient to provide authority for the regulation of the financial markets.

As always, perhaps the words do not mean what they apparently say, but I've always thought that constitutional texts should not be interpreted as suicide pacts.
 

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To be fair, leaving aside the "b-but the entirety of the New deal is unconstitutional" blather, there is a fairly meritorious point scurrying around in the thicket of Bart's posts here, to wit, the Fed is a troublingly puissant entity, which operates largely in secret, and over which there are few democratic checks. In this respect, Bart might be surprised to find himself aligned with William Greider, whose Secrets of the Temple should be required reading for anyone interested not just in monetary policy but in how our economic system is and is not regulated.

This is not to say that I'm on board with the idea that no agency of the federal government shoudl be allowed to act to attempt to avert an economic crisis -- and that the response should instead be entrusted to Congress, in toto. There is something to be said for expertise and there is certainly a lot to be said for keeping monetary policy to a large extent independent of short-term political pressures.

But when you look at the vast powers that the Fed exercises -- including the ability to effectively nationalize a failing business -- without so much as a by-your-leave, it is well to pause on whether this is a remotely democratic setup. That the Fed should have some emergency powers is perhaps necessary. That it can take us further and further down the road of privatized profits and socialized losses -- without any control by elected representatives -- is an extraordinary thing.
 

ginger man said...

In this respect, Bart might be surprised to find himself aligned with William Greider, whose Secrets of the Temple should be required reading for anyone interested not just in monetary policy but in how our economic system is and is not regulated.

Not at all. I read Greider's book summary in the Rolling Stone when it came out. However, we only agree to the extent that the Fed should not have to power to legislate obligations for the US treasury. Unlike Greider, I do not have a constitutional or policy problem with the Fed as the national bank setting discount rates for the currency. This is an executive power created by congressional legislation.
 

Bart's point is cogent as to the Fed, although in reality it's inconceivable that they would take a step such as this without the consent of Treasury.

But as to the balance of the "bureaucracy," it's absurd in that it flies in the face of every argument Bart has ever made about the importance of the "unitary executive." The President is the one we elect, the argument goes, therefore he must have full authority to control the entire executive branch! Yet somehow, when a decision gets made that Bart doesn't like, the elected official who sits atop that particular branch gets written entirely out of the picture. Now it's just a bunch of unelected bureaucrats, curse the lack of accountability.

What Bart really means, of course, is that the Democrats should have to take the heat for cleaning up the mess created by decades created by decades of radical Republican deregulation. You really can't blame him for trying, I guess.
 

Bart: [W]e [i.e., Greider and Bart, the latter based on a Rolling Stone summary] only agree to the extent that the Fed should not have to power to legislate obligations for the US treasury.

Duly noted. But given that that is the very point we are discussing, it would seem that my point stands.

steve m:

What Bart really means, of course, is that the Democrats should have to take the heat for cleaning up the mess created by decades created by decades of radical Republican deregulation.

Indeed, although you can't lay this all at the Republicans' door, as Mourad points out. The Gramm-penned repealer of the Glass-Steagall laws had overwhelming bipartisan support. The Senate vote was something like 90-8 with seven democrats and one republican voting against. A true bipartisan cock-up. What's especially troubling to me is the selective dismantling of the New Deal system. We'll keep in place things like the Fed's emergency powers (which often amount to a very costly shutting of the barn doors after the horses have long gone), but go ahead and allow commercial banks and investment houses to merge into one seething mass of conflicted itnerests. And although the enabling legislation does appear to be drafted broadly enough to allow a Fed bailout (or Fed-funded fire sale) of an insurance company, query whether a system that was intended to shore up banks qua banks
should really be used to take over a massive private insurance firm.

And while we're at it, who is keeping track of the Fed's expenditures and obligations this year. It had about $900 billion in reserves, last I checked, and its overall obligations vis-a-vis Bear Stearns, Fannie & Freddie, and AIG certainly look to be enough to swamp those reserves. Is that why Paulson had to be brought on board? Is part of the deal a promise by Paulson to crank up the presses in order to feed cash to the Fed for its usual lending? And how on earth is the federal government going to retain AAA rating for its paper under these circumstances? And, again, should all this be done by a handful of appointed officials?
 

Postscript, some answers

Per CNBC, the Fed's bailouts this year total about $900 billion. So, the bailouts do swamp the Fed's reserves.

Per WSJ, Paulson is going to auction Treasury securities to pump cash into the otherwise-broke Fed.

We are so screwed.

I don't know whether to call this lemon capitalism or lemon socialism.
 

steve m said...

Bart's point is cogent as to the Fed, although in reality it's inconceivable that they would take a step such as this without the consent of Treasury.

But as to the balance of the "bureaucracy," it's absurd in that it flies in the face of every argument Bart has ever made about the importance of the "unitary executive." The President is the one we elect, the argument goes, therefore he must have full authority to control the entire executive branch.


I do subscribe to the Unitary Executive theory to the extent that it states that the President was granted all executive power and has the final say on the actions of this branch.

However, what we are discussing is legislation by the bureaucracy. Legislation is a plenary power of Congress and neither the bureaucracy nor its nominal boss the President has any business under the Constitution engaging in legislation.

Finally, I am not engaging in the partisan blame game concerning this wave of mortgage failures. The folks at fault are the lenders and borrowers who made bad decisions. IMHO, they rather than the tax payers should suffer the consequences of their bad decisions to the fullest extent possible short of causing the financial system to collapse. Any bailouts of the lenders should be contingent upon the decision makers losing everything.
 

The folks at fault are the lenders and borrowers who made bad decisions.

I guess the folks who converted shitty loans into shitty securities by means of arcane and obfuscatory financial instruments, those who peddled such shitty securities to unsuspecting investors (big and small) who had no idea what crap they were buying, those who legislated in ways that made this scenario possible, and the federal regulators who failed to enforce what's left of the law are held completely harmless.
 

While recording that on this day in 1787, the US Constitution was adopted by the 39 delegates in Pennsylvania, and pace Bart, I do not see why primary financial services legislation cannot set out broad principles and objectives and create a body to develop the detailed regulatory framework. Secondary legislation is well established in all modern democracies and I do not see how this could be unconstitutional - the compatibility of the secondary legislation with the primary and with the Constitution can always be tested in the Courts by judicial review.

One of the US problems is the plethora of regulators often working at cross-purposes. That needs streamlining. Senator Schumer and Mayor Bloomberg advocated looking at the UK "Single Regulator" system and for those who are interested, the primary legislation The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 sets out the statutory scheme.

There are three big areas affecting consumers: inappropriate mortgage transactions; inappropriate insurance transactions; and
inappropriate pension schemes.

So as an example of what happens in the UK in relation to mortgages here are the FSA Key Rules for Mortgage Brokers and here is a newletter for broker management Mortgage Advisers Newsletter

I wonder how many duff sub-prime mortgages would have been sold in the USA had similar standards been in place and enforced by continuing audit.

Contrary to Bart's view, I think the responsibility is on the providers of mortgage finance to ensure that the persons taking the mortgages receive appropriate advice. Mrs and Mrs Average need protection. And if need be equity requires the contract be rewritten where things have gone wrong.
 

The Gramm-penned repealer of the Glass-Steagall laws had overwhelming bipartisan support. The Senate vote was something like 90-8 with seven democrats and one republican voting against

The vote on the Glass-Steagall repeal was actually a narrowly-divided vote along party lines, with only one Democrat joining the Republican majority. You can see the vote here.

Many months later, there was a committee report and a brokered compromise which resulted in the bipartisan vote you reference. It is what it is, but it's not quite accurate to suggest that the Democrats went along merrily with the notion of repeal. And of course, this bill represented but one moment in a decades-long push for deregulation by the GOP.
 

And of course, this bill represented but one moment in a decades-long push for deregulation by the GOP.

I wouldn't let the Dems off the hook, but let's face it -- the Repubs would have passed the repeal once Bush took office. The fact that it came a year or so before that is pretty much irrelevant to where we are today.
 

I think it's perfectly fair to count the Senate vote on the legislation that actually went to President Clinton's desk for his signature as the relevant vote. (Clinton, by the way, was reputed to be a Democrat, although I remain unconvinced.)

Your point that repeal of Glass-Steagall, as well as other bouts of deregulation, were a long-term GOP project is sound. But we certainly should neither excuse nor paper over the complicity of many, many democrats in that project.

I think it fair also to observe that Robert Rubin moved to Citigroup after stepping down as Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury; that Citigroup had lobbied more intensely than any other entity for Glass-Steagall repeal; and that Citigroup's subsequent collapsing of investment, commercial banking, and insurance has palyed a roll in the unraveling of securitzed mortgages.
 

I wonder how many duff sub-prime mortgages would have been sold in the USA had similar standards been in place and enforced by continuing audit.

From my experience working in a brokerage over the last year, I have to say that I'm not particularly impressed by the standards you cite. Mostly, they're standard operating procedure and are covered by the reams of disclosures that are included within every loan package. Audits will find that things went along merrily; all the Is were dotted and the Ts were crossed. Such end-of-the-year audits are already required for every FHA loan we do.

I think the critical step is in the presentation of said disclosures and the comprehension in the client of the same. Audits are inefficient means of weeding out badly behaved brokers. A far more effective system is the lists maintained by lenders who watch which loans go well and which do not. Brokers can easily find themselves with no place to take a loan that previously would have been hunky-dory. Likewise, bad lenders tend to turnover quite quickly when the market goes rough. Visit mlimplode to watch that particular trainwreck.

If I were to create an off-the-cuff regulatory apparatus of some sort to address the home loan crisis, I'd make an independent federal appraisal agency. Have said appraisers work anonymously for a straight salary rather than payment per appraisal, and I think you'd see home prices stabilize, and see people meet their house payments with greater ease.

Many lenders have a set of pre-approved appraisers in place already (certainly FHA maintains such a list), but the choice and contact is often left in the broker's hands. Far better for it to be something you order from a group with the ethical obligation to remain neutral and a financial incentive for doing so.
 

"The fact that legislation helped usher in the greatest, mostly broadly shared economic expansion in history"

A rather strange description of taking an economic downturn, and stretching it out into a Great Depression.
 

PMS Chicago:-

I do not think it is the appraisement of the value of a property which is the problem.

The first and over-riding problem it is the evaluation of the ability of the applicant to repay.

In our system the lender's agent or broker has to gather a great deal of financial information from the applicant, verify it so far as possible, advise on the suitability of the mortgage product, and, above all to reach a view on the ability of the borrower to repay.

If you were to look at our regulator's web-site, you would conclude that all too often, those who conduct the interview process were really thinking about the commission they might earn if the application goes through, or the targets for new business the employer has set and the evaluation process gets skimped or even falsified. Our regulator took pretty drastic action. It banned two major providers from writing new business until they had 're-educated' their sales force. It imposed fines in substantial amounts It now conducts continuing audits. It fines those who are non-compliant or takes away their licences to act as mortgage intermediaries.

Because there was a political will to have every American family own their own home (just the same here in the UK) many people in the USA were given mortgages who would not have qualified on a normal appraisal of ability to repay. They got their mortgages because of the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae guarantees and then because Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae were perceived as being backed by the US Government, packages of those dubious mortgages were traded on the derivatives market (wholly unregulated in the USA - thanks to Senator Gramm who tucked the deregulation into one of those crisis ommnibus spending bills that Congress has to pass from time to time). And because the packages were seen as guaranteed, they were marketable internationally. Banks world wide bought these derivatives.

What we are seeing now is a credit crunch of unprecedented precautions. The interbank lending market has dried up because no-one wants to lend to anyone else until their exposure to the US sub-prime mortgage debacle has been quantified. That is a problem not just in the USA but world-wide.

Some institutions have had to be rescued or forced into shotgun marriages. Others - many, many more - are not lending while they try desperately to shore up their balance sheets. The consequence in the UK has been that new mortgages are much harder to get. New applications are at a 17 year low. That has fed back into the building industry where the big builders are posting very bad figures. House prices are falling at the fastest rate for 12 years. Further, if banks cannot lend, they cannot finance industry as industry might wish.

My suspicion is that "100%" mortgages are going to go out of favour. New applicants are going to have to come up with a 20-25% deposit. Bad for first time buyers who are going to have to rent or live with their parents while they save - as we did in England until the 1960's.

There may have to be quite an expansion of social housing initiatives - we have schemes for "key workers" (such as policemen, teachers and nurses) - shared ownership schemes - part rent and part mortgage - many run by registered social landlords - and provision of a percentage of such 'social housing' is usually a condition of getting planning permission for redevelopment in urban areas.
 

Why did the Fed rescue AIG ?

Sandy Chen of London Brokers Panmure Gordon suggests that this piece of AIG's regulatory filing is significant:-

"Approximately $307bn (consisting of corporate loans and prime residential mortgages) of the $441bn in notional exposure of AIGFP's super senior credit default swap portfolio as of June 30, 2008 represented derivatives written for financial institutions, principally in Europe, for the purpose of providing regulatory capital relief rather than risk mitigation. In exchange for a minimum guaranteed fee, the counterparties receive credit protection with respect to diversified loan portfolios they own, thus improving their regulatory capital position."

Meaning? The BBC's Robert Peston put it this way:-

"AIG is saying here that it has insured $307bn of corporate loans and prime residential mortgages that are on the balance sheets of banks, mostly European banks. The banks have bought this insurance to protect themselves against the risk that these loans would go bad, that borrowers would default. Their motive for doing so was to reassure their respective regulators - such as the FSA for UK banks - that these loans are of minimal risk. And the benefit of doing that was that they could lend considerably more relative to their capital resources.

But if AIG is in trouble, then doubts arise about whether it would be able to honour the financial commitments it has made through these insurance contracts (which, for those of you who like to learn the lingo, are called super senior credit default swaps). In fact, in a wholly mechanistic way, the downgrades of AIG's credit rating that we saw last night automatically increased the perceived riskiness of loans made by banks that have insured credit with AIG. Which means those banks' balance sheets become weaker - and that could mean that they'll be forced by their regulators to raise additional capital."


Peston added:-

"I suspect that Sandy Chen has found only a part of AIG's credit protection business, since I am told that US banks are more exposed to AIG than are European banks (which is not what the regulatory filing spotted by Chen shows)"

What the central bankers appear to be doing is seek to protect those institutions vital to the global retail banking system while leaving the investment banks (such as Lehman Brothers) to fend for themselves. Bad news for investment banks generally.
 

AIG, Inc. specializes in insurance services and financial services. The company offers a diverse range of insurance products, annuities, mutual funds, and many other financial products. I read about the company on the Internet. My attention was captured by the clients’ reports mostly. On this great site www.pissedconsumer.com I found out that the company tricks people in with low rates, which increase considerably once the contract is signed.
 

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