Word: defaulting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...under pressure from Congress and the press, also released the number of the counterparties to many of its credit default swaps. AIG had decided to insure the value of certain paper owned by the likes of Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanly (MS), and Deustsche Bank (DB). When the value of that paper fell, AIG was on the hook to pay off the "insurance" which kept the likes of Goldman from having to book large write downs. Those write downs might have pushed Goldman into a difficult financial situation. The same holds true for a number of the other companies doing...
...take a moment to review how AIG made money and why it's now losing so much. Most of AIG's losses have been attributed to its failing positions in credit-default swaps (CDSs). Essentially, AIG is swapping cash flows with other institutions: those banks pay AIG a small sum on a regular basis, and then under certain conditions - like mass foreclosure or corporations' defaulting on their loans - AIG pays out a large sum. In other words, AIG sold insurance; its problem is that it is paying out too much...
...earned from buying the AAA-rated bonds. Take a typical auto-loan bond. A top-rated auto ABS bond pays a dividend these days of about 3.5%, or a return of $3.5 million on an investment of $100 million, as long as the bond doesn't go into default. That's actually not a terrible yield right now. Just ask anyone with a savings account. (See 5 reasons for economic optimism...
...million. But remember, the investor had to put up just $8 million. That means the annual return on the much smaller up-front investment zooms to a fat 25%. Lower-rated auto loans can pay as much as 30%, but they have a much higher rate of default - and potential buyers will not get access to those low-cost government loans. Plus, these days, few investors are willing to take more risk than they have to. With no one to sell the lower-quality stuff to, banks may be stuck holding it. The good news is that so far, credit...
...That's why the banking industry has been lobbying furiously to alter the accounting requirement that forces it to continue to lower the value of those assets, even though many of the loans that back those bonds have yet to default and perhaps never will. Those losses are amplifying the bottom-line losses at a number of the nation's largest banks, wiping out their capital and putting them ever closer to collapse...