AIG photo-illustration
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Although a CDS is, in its simplest form, an insurance policy, AIG was selling something far more exotic. Say you buy a house and insure it. The insurer doesn't offer the same policy on your house to everyone else in the neighborhood; if it did and your house went up in flames, the insurer could get wiped out. In its CDS contracts, though, AIG wrote multiple insurance policies covering the same underlying package of increasingly toxic assets. In essence, it was underwriting systemic risk. This is the opposite of what insurance companies are supposed to do: diversify risk across the universe of policyholders. "One thing about the insurance model: it relies on diversification as its means to exist," says a top exec at an AIG competitor. "If an insurance company plays in a field where they underwrite systemic risk, that's a totally different experience." Is it ever. Insurance companies can handle catastrophic risk but not systemic risk. That's why you can buy hurricane insurance from private companies but not terrorism insurance. Only a government can take on that risk. At its most basic, AIG took on colossal risks that it could not afford.
With its high credit rating, AIG FP wasn't required to stockpile reserves, or collateral, as traditional insurers must to cover potential losses. As the CDOs that AIG insured began to crater, the counterparties began asking for more collateral to back their policies, which was written into the contracts. Cassano said in August 2007 that he couldn't imagine a situation in which AIG would "lose one dollar in any of these transactions." He was right. AIG didn't lose a dollar; it lost billions of them.
In a rare interview, former CEO Greenberg, who is suing AIG and being sued by the company over financial-management issues, tells TIME that once the company lost its top credit rating, AIG FP should have stopped writing swaps and hedged, or reinsured, its existing ones. But Cassano's unit doubled down after the spring of 2005, writing more and more subprime-linked swaps as the ratings plunged, which made the possible need for collateral enormous in the event its debt was downgraded. The downgrades occurred in 2008. "Of course they were going to run out of money," says Greenberg. He adds that as the liquidity crunch hit in 2008, AIG FP should have renegotiated terms with the banks to ease their demands on collateral. "You can renegotiate almost anything, anytime."
Last September, with global stock markets collapsing and credit markets frozen, Geithner, then head of the New York Fed, and Bernanke believed AIG was too close to collapse to do anything other than stop the bleeding. Failure by AIG to pay might have threatened its counterparties--for instance, Citigroup and, in turn, Citi's counterparties. A bond or a derivative is, after all, a promise to pay someone, and if there is no confidence in its fulfillment, the financial system ceases to function. It is not a fear that has gone away simply because AIG has been stabilized.
Bailing Out the Bailed Out