Goldman Sachs got $5.9 billion and Societe Generale received $5.5 billion of about $18.5 billion in collateral paid by AIG in the 15 months before the September bailout. The payments helped settle AIG’s obligations on $62.1 billion of credit-default swaps that the Federal Reserve later removed from the New York-based insurer as part of the rescue. Officials at AIG, Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale declined to comment.
“It was precisely that drain of liquidity to Goldman and SocGen that put AIG in a position of illiquidity and ultimately threw them into the government’s arms,” said Charles Calomiris, a finance professor at Columbia Business School in New York.
AIG disclosed a complete list last month of payments made to settle the $62.1 billion in derivatives. The figures for the period before the bailout were calculated by subtracting post- rescue payments disclosed in March from the sum of more than 150 transactions outlined in May.
“Goldman is to be congratulated for seeing the problem ahead of others and protecting itself from the impending failure of AIG,” said William Poole, former president of the St. Louis Fed, in an interview last week. “It’s not the responsibility of any private firm to determine what the public interest is — that’s why we have a government.”
Goldman Sachs bought protection on about $20 billion in assets from AIG, meaning the company was counting on $10 billion from the insurer after the underlying holdings lost about half their value, Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer David Viniar said in a March conference call. The firm had “no direct exposure” to AIG because it held about $7.5 billion in collateral and hedged its remaining $2.5 billion risk to the firm’s potential failure, Viniar said. The $7.5 billion tally includes trades unrelated to Maiden Lane.
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