Federal Reserve Attempted to Hide Payments to AIG
From the youtube video: “Ultimately, this was money that didn’t need to be spent and didn’t go towards stabilizing the market.” – Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)
New York Federal Reserve Sought to Limit AIG Bank Disclosures
Thomson-Reuters/Yahoo! News
The New York Federal Reserve Bank under Timothy Geithner urged insurer AIG in late 2008 to limit disclosures about its payments to banks after getting a $180 billion government bailout, emails released on Thursday showed.
The email exchanges, between the New York Fed and AIG lawyers, showed that AIG initially proposed disclosing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in early December 2008 that it would pay counterparties 100 cents on the dollar to liquidate credit default swaps it sold them. But the decision to pay Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale and other global banking giants in full with taxpayer funds was not disclosed by AIG until March 2009, when it announced a $93 billion payoff that stoked public rage over the bailout.
Adding fuel to the fire, Geithner, who by then had become the U.S. Treasury secretary, was forced to allow AIG to pay $165 million in bonuses to top executives of the division that nearly caused its collapse. Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who requested the emails from AIG and made them public, said they show that the New York Fed tried to suppress politically sensitive information about the bailout [...]
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