Ailing AIG Nears $30B Deal With Feds

Geithner, Paulson face grilling over 'backdoor bailouts' for AIG clients

(NEWSER) - Two Federal Reserve governors expressed their unease about the Fed's rejection of a plan to force big banks to return $30 billion in cash they received from AIG before its bailout in late 2008. The officials warned that the decision to let the banks, including Goldman Sachs, keep the collateral they paid AIG on credit insurance contracts might be "a gift" to the firms, according to documents obtained by the New York Times. More»

He's accused of handing AIG creditors 'backdoor bailout'

(NEWSER) - Tim Geithner did a lousy job of looking out for the interests of taxpayers during the AIG bailout last year, according to a report from a federal oversight group. Geithner, then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, made no attempt to renegotiate AIG's debts, effectively giving the insurer's creditors a "backdoor bailout," the report found. More»

Banks took in billions of dollars, even as they claimed to be healthy

(NEWSER) - For more than two years, the Fed and the banks it bailed out during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis have kept many of the details of the massive, multi-trillion-dollar bailout a secret. But, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests, 29,000 pages of bailout details are pouring out of the Fed at last, and those details are explained in an extended and damning report by Bloomberg Markets magazine. Among the biggest revelations:

• $7.77 trillion: the total amount doled out in aid by the Fed to all the banks, as of March 2009, which Bloomberg notes surpasses 50% of the value of "everything produced in the US that year." In comparison, the $700 billion TARP "at least had some strings attached," says one House Democrat. "With the Fed programs, there was nothing."

Bloomberg reveals peak amount for the first time

(NEWSER) - In 2006, their best year ever, the 10 biggest US banks and brokerage firms made $104 billion in profits. By 2008, they had taken more than six times that amount—$669 billion—in emergency Federal Reserve loans. That amount, as well as amount loaned by the Fed to all its borrowers, remained secret until Bloomberg obtained the information via FOIA requests. The peak borrowing? On Dec. 5, 2008, banks and other companies had an outstanding balance of $1.2 trillion—which, Bloomberg notes, is about how much US homeowners now owe on delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. More»

Banks sought to block details from media

(NEWSER) - The Federal Reserve will release information on several emergency loans it made to prominent banks when the financial crisis struck in 2008, CNNMoney reports. Bloomberg News initially filed a lawsuit against the Fed in an attempt to gain details on the loans; the Fed declined the request due to "trade secrets" that might be revealed in the fine print. While the banks and Fed won the initial lawsuit, an appellate court ruled that the media should get the information. More»