October 07, 2014
Andrew Ross Sorkin tells us that the fact the AIG bailout was about helping Goldman Sachs and other big banks is not news because we knew it all along. This is one that gets the blood flowing early in the morning.
This brings to mind the old line, what’s this “we” jazz, white man? Yes, it was knowable that the AIG bailout was about saving the banks and many of us argued that at the time. But this money was not generally included on the list of handouts to Goldman Sachs and its CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who takes home $20 million a year. (That’s roughly equal to what 12,700 food stamp beneficiaries receive.) So yes, many of us did call the AIG bailout a backdoor handout to the banks, but that was not something generally conceded in policy circles.
It matters because if everyone understood that the $192 billion injected into AIG was largely about keeping big banks from failing then there might have been more political support for breaking up the big banks and in other ways restricting their conduct. Conceding this point now that the debate over financial reform is largely in the past seems more than a bit dishonest.
If I can be allowed a brief digression, back in the mid-1990s the Washington Post ran a major front page article that bemoaned the fact that U.S. soldiers who had died in the civil war in El Salvador had not received proper military honors. The problem was that the Reagan administration was trying to conceal that we had troops in combat situations, so it couldn’t acknowledge the true fate of these soldiers. Incredibly, the piece only discussed the plight of the soldiers and their families. It acted as though we all knew that the Reagan administration had lied about the involvement of U.S. troops in combat.
Of course many people did believe that the Reagan administration was lying back in the 1980s, but there had never been any major stories in the Washington Post, or any other major newspaper, that told readers that the Reagan administration was lying. In the same vein, it has not been the generally accepted backdrop in reporting that the AIG bailout was about rescuing the big banks, even though many of us did know this at the time.
Finally, Sorkin again makes the annoying assertion on the AIG bailout that, “we got our money back — with more than $22 billion in profit.”
This one deserves derision. Access to liquidity back in 2008-2009 carried an enormous premium. We gave $192 billion to AIG at a time when other companies were dying for cash. We would have made an enormous profit if we had invested government cash almost anywhere. For example, if we lent $192 billion to Dean Baker’s Excellent Hedge Fund, which used it to invest in the S&P 500 and then split the gains with the government, the country would have pocketed over $100 billion from the deal. So would Dean Baker’s Excellent Hedge Fund.
Saying that the government made a profit on the bailout deals is irrelevant in any meaningful sense. The people who make this assertion are either showing their ignorance or being dishonest.
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