Aig Insurance Quotes & Sayings

The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG was in the fall of 2009 - only this time, it's not just one giant insurance company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of millions of hardworking Americans who played by the rules. — Arianna Huffington

There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry's purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars' worth of bonds. He'd either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he'd insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn't own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to "insure" it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn't insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market - and this was the second way to think about it. — Michael Lewis

default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG - American International Group, Inc. Or, rather, a unit of AIG called AIG FP. AIG Financial Products was created — Michael Lewis

Goldman Sachs itself - and so Goldman was in the position of selling bonds to its customers created by its own traders, so they might bet against them. Secondly, there was a crude, messy, slow, but acceptable substitute for Mike Burry's credit default swaps: the actual cash bonds. According to a former Goldman derivatives trader, Goldman would buy the triple-A tranche of some CDO, pair it off with the credit default swaps AIG sold Goldman that insured the tranche (at a cost well below the yield on the tranche), declare the entire package risk-free, and hold it off its balance sheet. Of course, the whole thing wasn't risk-free: If AIG went bust, the insurance was worthless, and Goldman could lose everything. Today Goldman Sachs is, to put it mildly, unhelpful when asked to explain exactly what it did, and this lack of transparency extends to its own shareholders. If a team of forensic accountants went over Goldman's books, they'd be shocked at just how good Goldman is at hiding things, — Michael Lewis

When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default swaps in $100 million chunks, Burry guessed, rightly, that Goldman wasn't ultimately on the other side of his bets. Goldman would never be so stupid as to make huge naked bets that millions of insolvent Americans would repay their home loans. He didn't know who, or why, or how much, but he knew that some giant corporate entity with a triple-A rating was out there selling credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG - American International Group, Inc. — Michael Lewis

Sharia has become an increasingly significant force in American capitalism, thanks to the embrace by Wall Street and the U.S. government of so-called Sharia-Compliant Finance. Indeed, this country's taxpayers now own the largest purveyor of sharia-compliant insurance products in the world: AIG. — Frank Gaffney

Hey, guess what? Turns out the free market? Not so free. Wall Street was hit hard Monday when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America, and insurance giant AIG neared a collapse of its own. Basically, if your commercials air during golf tournaments, you're done. — Amy Poehler

The gang that trashed the town was now back in town to trash it even more and you'll never guess.. they decided that the only way to save an economy brought to its knees by their collective actions and the banking system they represent was to, well, no, surely not.. hand trillions of taxpayer-borrowed dollars to the Rothschild-controlled banks and insurance companies like CitiGroup, J. P. Morgan, AIG and a long list of others. — David Icke