The Obama administration may authorize the Department of Veterans Affairs to bill the private insurance companies of veterans, The Washington Post reported.
Obama: Decriminalize Homosexuality Worldwide
ABC News' Kirit Radia reports: The Obama administration said today it will sign on to a United Nations declaration calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality around the world. The move is a reversal of the position taken by the Bush...
Eliot Spitzer: AIG's 'flavor of the month'
by Mark Silva
Eliot Spitzer, former governor and attorney general of New York, made a name for himself fighting the white-collar excesses of Wall Streetuntil he made a name for himself as the customer of an excessively expensive call-girl ring.
Now Spitzer is writing columns for Slate and appearing on shows like WNYC's Newsroom, as he did todaycalling the controversial AIG bonuses "the flavor of the month...'' and "pocket change compared to the amount of unregulated money AIG is passing along to other banks.''
Spitzer, speaking with WNYC's Brian Lehrer, recalls action that he had taken as New York's A.G. that led to a $1.4 billion settlement with the insurance conglomerate.
"We were approached by some sources who said that AIG, which was at the time guided by Hank Greenberg as CEO, was, to speak in street vernacular, juicing its books by creating false reinsurance contracts that would appear to add capital to its balance sheet,'' Spitzer said. "Now that sounds all very complicated, but what it really means is they were playing games with their accounting in order to look stronger than they were...
"These contracts, it was alleged, were designed to make them look better in the eyes of Wall Street,'' he said. "We investigated, brought a civil case to settlement of $1.4 billion.
"At the time, $1.4 billion seemed like a lot of money. It was the biggest financial settlement ever,'' Spitzer said. "The board removed Hank Greenberg because he invoked the Fifth Amendment, when he was asked about this. Four people were charged criminally and convicted for basically playing games. But it led us to inquire and to probe into the inner workings of the company and what we saw was a mess.''
Lehrer asked about the government's bailout of AIG, wondering if it was necessary "precisely because they are so intertwined with the big banks and all this money on their toxic assets, that if AIG were allowed to fail like Lehman Brothers, the whole financial market would really collapse way beyond what we've seen so far?
"Let's go back to where we were last fall, right after Lehman had failed which is, almost universally viewed, as having been a policy error,'' Spitzer said.
"You had Bear Stearns, you then had Lehman on the cusp and I think what really happened is that Washington said, we have to show that somebody can fail, that we won't bail everybody out,'' he said. "The whole discussion of too big to fail is a separate discussion. I think policy was fundamentally flawed to let these banks get that big without putting real constraints upon them.
"Either you are too big to fail and we regulate you, or we break you up so you are not too big to fail. You can't have it both ways, too big to fail, without the regulation...
.
"Parts of AIG needed to be preserved, some of these contracts needed to be stabilized, you couldn't have another credit crisis such as that happened after Lehman failed, but that doesn't mean that you write a check for $173 billion, 100 cents on the dollar, to cover all these contracts,'' he said.
.He was asked if the attorney general's office had seen the credit default swaps at the company and the risk that they represented when it was examining AIG.
"We were not looking at that part of the company,'' Spitzer said. "We were looking at their reinsurance contracts with Gen Re, but what we saw was a company, when you peeled back the first layer of the onion, that was without anything close to adequate controls and adequate structure to know what was going.
"The way they put their financials together was something that was absolutely beyond what was acceptable, which was why they paid a fine of $1.4 billion.''
Spitzer's work on Wall Street helped him win election as governor of the Empire State, until his dalliances with Empire VIP escorts cost him his job. He quit.
Is Conventional Wisdom About Abusers True?
R&B singer Chris Brown was charged with two felonies following an argument with his girlfriend, pop singer Rihanna. He will be arraigned in April. The conventional wisdom is that "domestic abusers never change," and that abusers are generally men, but is that true?
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar