AIG bailout: Taxpayers profit $15.1 billion

[Dick Tuck]

Sure.. just as soon as you prove that that was the result that was going to happen....

Best evidence is way over your pointy little head.

Uh huh.. just show it... I'm waiting, troll

Waiting for what, you lying piece of shit. Congress is granted power to enact any law they think is in our best interest, as long as it doesn't violate any granted protection. Your pea brain analysis that this somehow violates States rights is stone ignorant.

Were you homeschooled by the Kardasian family?

 

[Oldguy]

No.. it does NOT.. see article 1 section 8.... the powers of congress are LIMITED and SPECIFIC.... and if they do something not specifically listed, it is in direct violation of the constitution... please see the 10th amendment

The executive branch's powers are also SPECIFICALLY listed...

Go educate yourself

Idiot

You're a ******* moron. Where in TARP did the executive branch usurp any States rights?

The minute it took upon itself a power that is not specifically granted to the federal government via the constitution... any power not specifically granted that is taken or used by the fed, is in direct violation of the 10th amendment

Ever hear of the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979? If that was Constitutional, why would the bailout of AIG not be?

 

[g5000]

Define the suspension of the Constitution.

Describe what you would have done instead. AIG was in collapse, and did not have the capital to pay off around a trillion dollars in credit default swaps. If they didn't, a literal chain reaction would have taken place in banks across the country and around the world, all of whom held that paper.

Thanks.

.

If a business is not allowed to fail, that is not capitalism.

Not only did Wall Street get to be rescued from their failures, they were given trillions in cash with no strings attached. No repercussions. No fraudsters in prison. No changes in their practices.

AIG should have been propped up long enough to wind it down in an orderly fashion and shutter its doors.

Don't worry. A much better managed company would have come along to replace them. That's how real capitalism works.


And that CDS paper of which you speak? The holders of that paper received 100 cents on the dollar. Not the slightest haircut was given to them for their recklessness.

And guess who was one of the biggest holders of that paper? Goldman Sachs. Which is where Hank Paulson came from as CEO before he became SecTreas and bailed their asses out 100 percent.


Total Wall Street Bailout Cost


.

"Wall Street" encompasses thousands of individual investment and delivery entities.
Most are large industrial investment groups primarily made up of retirees, small and large business, rich and middle class Americans. They handle the collection of investment dollars from school funds, large and small business, invest it and handle the monthly delivery of those assets back to every day American citizens in the form of pensions and annuities. Every insurance product out there is also part of that mass. Claims for business, retirees, average every day Americans and every other form of claim comes out of those insurance entities that are funded with "Wall Street" investment dollars.
Sure, Wall Street fucked up but they fucked up WITH OUR $$$.
They were about to fail WITH OUR $$$.
Millions of retirees that receive small pensions and annuities would have not received anything if "Wall Street" would have failed.

Oh, I am well aware of that. I have pointed out in countless topics that one of the reasons college tuition and insurance premiums have risen is due to their losses in the crash. It is also why public employee pension funds are cash strapped now.

The people who manage OUR $$$ think proximity to OUR $$$ makes them smart. But they took the box seats and all the hookers and blow the broker-dealers threw at them. The quid pro quo was that they bought the shit derivatives they were offered with no questions asked, all the while pretending they knew what they were doing.

Of course, when the shit derivatives blew up, then all those people who handle OUR $$$ rushed to court claiming they had been bamboozled.

They had certainly been defrauded, but had these dipshits handling OUR $$$ done even the slightest due diligence, the fraud would have been exposed.

The whole system should be torn down and replaced with the honest brokers who would fill the vacuum.

Instead, the entire criminal network is allowed to remain, continuing in their criminal work.

.

 

[Dick Tuck]

No.. it does NOT.. see article 1 section 8.... the powers of congress are LIMITED and SPECIFIC.... and if they do something not specifically listed, it is in direct violation of the constitution... please see the 10th amendment

The executive branch's powers are also SPECIFICALLY listed...

Go educate yourself

Idiot

You're a ******* moron. Where in TARP did the executive branch usurp any States rights?

The minute it took upon itself a power that is not specifically granted to the federal government via the constitution... any power not specifically granted that is taken or used by the fed, is in direct violation of the 10th amendment

Wow, you're one ignorant turdball. The Constitution grants congress the right to enact any public law that they deem to be in the best interest of our Nation, as long as it doesn't usurp any granted right.

You are one lightweight idiot.

 

[Dick Tuck]

Where does the Constitution authorize the federal government to use our tax dollars to rescue failed companies?

You also say it "had to be done." Why? You assume that propping up a failed company and stopping it from going under is a good thing. In the short term, that may be true with less people losing their jobs, etc., but what about the long term effects? We'll never know which new company or existing may have been risen up to fill the hole left by AIG with a better business model. The government's actions also sent a message to company executives everywhere that if you screw up and you're "too big to fail" don't worry about it, we'll be here to bail you out.

This set a very bad precedent.

We'll never know what company might have risen from the ashes of failure, but one thing we DO know is that the entire economy did not collapse, sparing millions upon millions of people from abject poverty and literal starvation.

And, make no mistake: That is PRECISELY what would have happened if the whole worlds banking system would have collapsed.

So you think it was a better idea to slap some scotch tape on the house of cards? Why not, if we're lucky that tape will hold until after we die, as long as that house of cards doesn't collapse while I'm alive.

All that matters is that the Bush administration decided it was worth putting scotch tape on your so-called house of cards. Obama just made sure that the tax payers were fucked less than the corporate morons.

It worked.

 

[Oldguy]

Where does the Constitution authorize the federal government to use our tax dollars to rescue failed companies?

You also say it "had to be done." Why? You assume that propping up a failed company and stopping it from going under is a good thing. In the short term, that may be true with less people losing their jobs, etc., but what about the long term effects? We'll never know which new company or existing may have been risen up to fill the hole left by AIG with a better business model. The government's actions also sent a message to company executives everywhere that if you screw up and you're "too big to fail" don't worry about it, we'll be here to bail you out.

This set a very bad precedent.

We'll never know what company might have risen from the ashes of failure, but one thing we DO know is that the entire economy did not collapse, sparing millions upon millions of people from abject poverty and literal starvation.

And, make no mistake: That is PRECISELY what would have happened if the whole worlds banking system would have collapsed.

So you think it was a better idea to slap some scotch tape on the house of cards? Why not, if we're lucky that tape will hold until after we die, as long as that house of cards doesn't collapse while I'm alive.

Economies are always houses of cards. No matter what kind of economy it is, or on what it's built, it is always fragile.

And, yes, patching it up for awhile was far preferable to allowing millions of innocents to suffer for the acts of a few. Granted, I wish those few would have gone to jail for what they did, and I don't like that they didn't. However, that wasn't the primary concern back then, nor should it have been.

 

[Gadawg73]

If a business is not allowed to fail, that is not capitalism.

Not only did Wall Street get to be rescued from their failures, they were given trillions in cash with no strings attached. No repercussions. No fraudsters in prison. No changes in their practices.

AIG should have been propped up long enough to wind it down in an orderly fashion and shutter its doors.

Don't worry. A much better managed company would have come along to replace them. That's how real capitalism works.


And that CDS paper of which you speak? The holders of that paper received 100 cents on the dollar. Not the slightest haircut was given to them for their recklessness.

And guess who was one of the biggest holders of that paper? Goldman Sachs. Which is where Hank Paulson came from as CEO before he became SecTreas and bailed their asses out 100 percent.


Total Wall Street Bailout Cost


.

"Wall Street" encompasses thousands of individual investment and delivery entities.
Most are large industrial investment groups primarily made up of retirees, small and large business, rich and middle class Americans. They handle the collection of investment dollars from school funds, large and small business, invest it and handle the monthly delivery of those assets back to every day American citizens in the form of pensions and annuities. Every insurance product out there is also part of that mass. Claims for business, retirees, average every day Americans and every other form of claim comes out of those insurance entities that are funded with "Wall Street" investment dollars.
Sure, Wall Street fucked up but they fucked up WITH OUR $$$.
They were about to fail WITH OUR $$$.
Millions of retirees that receive small pensions and annuities would have not received anything if "Wall Street" would have failed.

Oh, I am well aware of that. I have pointed out in countless topics that one of the reasons college tuition and insurance premiums have risen is due to their losses in the crash. It is also why public employee pension funds are cash strapped now.

The people who manage OUR $$$ think proximity to OUR $$$ makes them smart. But they took the box seats and all the hookers and blow the broker-dealers threw at them. The quid pro quo was that they bought the shit derivatives they were offered with no questions asked, all the while pretending they knew what they were doing.

Of course, when the shit derivatives blew up, then they all those people who handle OUR $$$ rushed to court claiming they had been bamboozled.

They had certainly been defrauded, but had these dipshits handling OUR $$$ done even the slightest due diligence, the fraud would have been exposed.

The whole system should be torn down and replaced with the honest brokers who would fill the vacuum.

Instead, the entire criminal network is allowed to remain, continuing in their criminal work.

.

Partially true but with one large fact left out:
Wall Street consists of hundreds of entities with hundreds of thousands of employees.
A very small % that made the decisions that caused the crash. In fact, most investing has nothing to do whatsoever with what caused the crash.

 

[Dick Tuck]

It's obvious you are no Constitutional scholar, so I won't bother explaining the importance of amendments and court rulings on the literal wording of the Constitution. You wouldn't get it anyhow.

SHOW THE ******* POWER GRANTED....... It is that ******* simple..... Here is the link to the full text
The United States Constitution - The U.S. Constitution Online - USConstitution.net

Show me WHERE it is granted.... I can easily show you the list of limited and enumerated powers granted to congress... I can show you the specific powers granted to the executive.. .I can show you where it clearly shows that any power not granted to the government by the constitution is reserved for the states and/or the people respectively....

And while you are at it.. show me in the powers granted to the judicial branch where they have the power to rule on the wording of the constitution... I'll be waiting

You are the one who is obviously no constitutional scholar... and you have pretty much shown you do not have even a general knowledge of the constitution

Commerce Clause.

Since allowing these companies to fail would have impacted commerce across the entire US the Commerce Clause is where they have the authority. At least, that's how it will be interpreted. If it worked for Obamacare it can work for this too.

Plus General Welfare clause. Even Scalia and Thomas wouldn't be stupid enough to endorse Diamond Douche Bags insipid analysis.

 

[Oldguy]

It looks like we were all wrong. The taxpayers will make a profit off the AIG bailout after all.


"Taxpayers will soon shed their last holdings in the American International Group, more than four years after a rescue by the federal government during the most chaotic days of the financial crisis….

…..At the time, critics feared that the company would be forced into a fire sale of assets to repay those loans, a sale that would deeply shortchange taxpayers.
Instead, the federal government has said that it expects to walk away from A.I.G. with a profit — about $15.1 billion to date, by the Treasury Department’s reckoning. That has followed both a steady stream of stock sales over the last two years and a resurgence in the insurer’s core operations….."

Bailout Over, U.S. Treasury Plans to Sell A.I.G. Shares - NYTimes.com

Let me ask you something.

Thanks to the financial services sector and its global derivatives bubble, we went from an unemployment rate of 4.6 percent to over 10 percent. They created millions upon millions of poorer people all over the world, and wiped out entire economies across the globe.

How many trillions do you think that cost? All that lost income. All those bankruptcies. All those destroyed lives. All that taxpayer funded stimulus money. All those taxpayer funded federal unemployment checks, food stamps, and support programs that PoliticalChic gets positively hysterical over.


What's that cost the world so far?


No one gives a **** about a paltry few billion dollars of imaginary "profit" made during a global catastrophe. Oh, look, I found a nickel that washed up on the beach after the tsunami!



.

And, how many more millions would have been unemployed, how many more trillions would it have taken to restore destroyed economies, how much more would it have cost the world had the bailout not occurred?

We cannot know for sure, but it's pretty safe bet that it would have been far, far more than it cost us to bail it out, don't you think?

 

[Gadawg73]

Wall Street investment analysis, benefits payable entities, customer service, management of assets and many other job descriptions in each of the individual business models in the hundreds of firms there are not criminal in any way.
They are doing their job.
Many investment heads and accountants that fucked the books ARE criminals.
To put everyone in the same basket is not objective.

 

[Oldguy]

Ok Kreskin

Alright, prove me wrong. What WOULD BE the effects of a banking system collapse all over the world?

That's a loaded question that already assumes such a massive collapse would happen.

Do you not understand? It WAS collapsing! That's not a theory or prediction of the future. It was in the process of falling apart.

 

[Oldguy]

The whole system should be torn down and replaced with the honest brokers who would fill the vacuum.


.

And what would such a system look like? Where would you find "honest brokers" and how could you ensure they stay honest?

Human nature is still human nature and large piles of cash still attract sticky fingers.

 

[Wacky Quacky]

We'll never know what company might have risen from the ashes of failure, but one thing we DO know is that the entire economy did not collapse, sparing millions upon millions of people from abject poverty and literal starvation.

And, make no mistake: That is PRECISELY what would have happened if the whole worlds banking system would have collapsed.

So you think it was a better idea to slap some scotch tape on the house of cards? Why not, if we're lucky that tape will hold until after we die, as long as that house of cards doesn't collapse while I'm alive.

All that matters is that the Bush administration decided it was worth putting scotch tape on your so-called house of cards. Obama just made sure that the tax payers were fucked less than the corporate morons.

It worked.

Tell that to all of the people who still don't have a job, while those corporate morons are rolling in tax dollars.

 

[g5000]

Partially true but with one large fact left out:
Wall Street consists of hundreds of entities with hundreds of thousands of employees.
A very small % that made the decisions that caused the crash. In fact, most investing has nothing to do whatsoever with what caused the crash.

On the contrary. It required many tens of thousands of mindless cogs all performing their small part toward crashing the economy. From the borrower to the realtor to the mortgage broker to the assessor to the bundler to the servicer to the derivatives broker to the ratings agent to the swaps seller to the investor. The entire chain allowed itself to be corrupted by the mantra, "If we don't do it, someone else will".


.

 

[Koios]

It looks like we were all wrong. The taxpayers will make a profit off the AIG bailout after all.


"Taxpayers will soon shed their last holdings in the American International Group, more than four years after a rescue by the federal government during the most chaotic days of the financial crisis….

…..At the time, critics feared that the company would be forced into a fire sale of assets to repay those loans, a sale that would deeply shortchange taxpayers.
Instead, the federal government has said that it expects to walk away from A.I.G. with a profit — about $15.1 billion to date, by the Treasury Department’s reckoning. That has followed both a steady stream of stock sales over the last two years and a resurgence in the insurer’s core operations….."

Bailout Over, U.S. Treasury Plans to Sell A.I.G. Shares - NYTimes.com

This should come as little surprise. It was considered a bargain at the time by most analysts on Wall Street.

 

[Mr. Peepers]

I agree with Dave. Let the chips fall as they may. If it resulted in a financial disaster for us? So be it. We should be the generation to suffer for it...afterall, all we really did was kick the can down the road...and since? We are on the "fiscal cliff" and "brink of a recession" and "debt up to our eyeballs" and "threat of downgrading the US".....on a regular basis....

Sorry, only those heralding "trickle down / funnel up" should be responsible and suffer. The rest of us saw what was coming a mile away. This is what happens when you let corporations "police" themselves and allow for shady business dealings for short-term gain - and plan on letting John Q Public deal with the aftermath. It's like you're all drunk on Enron's flat koolaid. Why should main street pay the price (and THEY are the ones who would have paid the price) for the private sector's criminal actions? Legal or not, they are still absolutely criminal.

 

[Wacky Quacky]

We'll never know what company might have risen from the ashes of failure, but one thing we DO know is that the entire economy did not collapse, sparing millions upon millions of people from abject poverty and literal starvation.

And, make no mistake: That is PRECISELY what would have happened if the whole worlds banking system would have collapsed.

So you think it was a better idea to slap some scotch tape on the house of cards? Why not, if we're lucky that tape will hold until after we die, as long as that house of cards doesn't collapse while I'm alive.

Economies are always houses of cards. No matter what kind of economy it is, or on what it's built, it is always fragile.

And, yes, patching it up for awhile was far preferable to allowing millions of innocents to suffer for the acts of a few. Granted, I wish those few would have gone to jail for what they did, and I don't like that they didn't. However, that wasn't the primary concern back then, nor should it have been.

People will still suffer at some point in the future, because nothing was done about the problem. We're just passing the buck to the next generation.

Feel the pain now or feel the pain later, it won't hurt any less regardless of which you choose.

 

[g5000]

The whole system should be torn down and replaced with the honest brokers who would fill the vacuum.


.

And what would such a system look like? Where would you find "honest brokers" and how could you ensure they stay honest?

Human nature is still human nature and large piles of cash still attract sticky fingers.

When you allow dishonest and incompetent brokers to fail, then better models replace them.

When you don't, you increase the size of the next crash.

All this talk about how we had to rescue them because it would have affected billions of innocents. Well, how the **** do you think we got here?

We got here because we have been bailing out the fuckups for decades. This is the snowball effect.

The next crash? We won't be talking about Too Big To Fail any more. We will be dealing with Too Big To Save.

And then God help us all.



.

 

[Dick Tuck]

So you think it was a better idea to slap some scotch tape on the house of cards? Why not, if we're lucky that tape will hold until after we die, as long as that house of cards doesn't collapse while I'm alive.

All that matters is that the Bush administration decided it was worth putting scotch tape on your so-called house of cards. Obama just made sure that the tax payers were fucked less than the corporate morons.

It worked.

Tell that to all of the people who still don't have a job, while those corporate morons are rolling in tax dollars.

Too bad that Obama isn't a socialist. At least he helped protect the American taxpayers from getting hosed by the right wing corporatists.

 

[Mustang]

It looks like we were all wrong. The taxpayers will make a profit off the AIG bailout after all.


"Taxpayers will soon shed their last holdings in the American International Group, more than four years after a rescue by the federal government during the most chaotic days of the financial crisis….

…..At the time, critics feared that the company would be forced into a fire sale of assets to repay those loans, a sale that would deeply shortchange taxpayers.
Instead, the federal government has said that it expects to walk away from A.I.G. with a profit — about $15.1 billion to date, by the Treasury Department’s reckoning. That has followed both a steady stream of stock sales over the last two years and a resurgence in the insurer’s core operations….."

Bailout Over, U.S. Treasury Plans to Sell A.I.G. Shares - NYTimes.com

According to an AP story below, the gov't received $22.7 Billion more than it paid.

Treasury Has Sold Its Last Shares of AIG (and Turned a Profit, Too) - DailyFinance