One more secret of the American International Group’s bailout became public on Wednesday: a list of the tens of billions of dollars in toxic assets that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York bought for 100 cents on the dollar from A.I.G.’s trading partners.
Representative Darrell Issa of California, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, released the list after the committee’s hearing on the A.I.G. bailout, even though he said the New York Fed wanted to keep it under wraps until 2018. But Mr. Issa said it made little sense to keep the information private. (See the list on the jump.)
“A lot of these assets were short term,” he told Mary Willliams Walsh of The New York Times. “Most will have been liquidated in the next three to four years.”
The list of derivative transactions is part of the 250,000 pages of internal documents on A.I.G. that were subpoenaed by the House committee. Until now, the details of what the New York Fed bought from from A.I.G.’s counterparties in November 2008 were not publicly known, nor the specific losses.
In his statement releasing the document, Mr. Issa argued, “It’s not conjecture, it’s not speculation, it’s fact — the New York Fed gave a backdoor bailout to A.I.G.’s counterparties and then tried to cover it up.”
Mr. Issa added, “No one has answered the question as to why the New York Fed were so adamant at keeping details of the counterparty deal confidential.”
On January 29, 2010, In The Public, By Tiffiniy Cheng
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