I just spent an hour today going through American International Group’s last twenty years of Annual Reports, finding out how much tax AIG has paid over the last 20 years, working out estimates of how much tax its employees have paid on their incomes and how much has been remitted to the Treasury on dividends [...]

Hank Paulson has an article in the Financial Times where he emphasises that a key part of fixing financial regulation in the US is the task of changing the architecture of financial regulation. This is essential for avoiding problems [...]

What we are seeing right now are the kinds of last ditch efforts that reveal how truly inept and desperate our leaders are. First there is the AIG bonus fiasco, a case study in the bumbling incompetence of the representatives in charge of containing the financial fallout (ironically the very people that preempted [...]

Not so long ago, AIG was the world’s largest insurer. In the year 2000, its value peaked at over $265 billion, and just one year ago, the insurance giant was worth nearly $170 billion. But last month, facing bankruptcy, the once-proud AIG—now worth a mere $2.65 billion—became the largest welfare recipient in U.S. history, receiving [...]

Why, oh why, did the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression have to hit during a presidential election year?
The ‘Fear Index’, also known as the VIX (or, officially, the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index) is a financial tool that measures market swings or volatility. The higher the VIX goes, the scarier the market [...]

In recent history, governments have nationalized banks when the pressures of internationalized financial markets and international competition have made it difficult for them to control and stabilize their finances and currency. During the last couple of decades, countries as different as Mexico, France, Sweden, and Japan carried out partial or more or less complete bank [...]

The Federal Reserve was created 95 years ago to prevent banking crises as an independent agency whose Washington-based governors are appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. Its officials usually steer clear of the most heated political debates in a bid to protect their freedom to make the tough [...]

Several questions during the last few days pointed out the obvious: lost in the media coverage of the American financial crisis and the tail end of the presidential election seems to be the fact that there really is news beyond Wall Street and Main Street.
I could not agree more.
For example, how much attention has been [...]

I confess I wasn’t happy to wake up Wednesday morning and find out that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson had decided to put taxpayers on the hook for up to $85 billion in loans to AIG, the world’s largest insurer of mortgage-backed securities.
I was even more dismayed [...]

OK, I know Lehman Brothers just tanked, Fannie and Freddie have been seized, and AIG has been taken over by the Fed, but can we put all that aside for just a few minutes and talk about me for a change, please? I have liquidity problems of my own, and that being the case, I [...]