From Pine View Farm

When Zombie Banks Walked the Earth, Not Worth a Plugged Nickel Dept. 0

At least with a plugged nickel you can get a penny Tootsie Roll:

AIG, still on the hook to pay back the government $173 billion, is attracting interest for its asset-management units, lining up a half-dozen potential buyers, the Wall Street Journal reports today, leading off its coverage. That’s the good news. The bad news is “the sale of the $100 billion portfolio has become complicated by client withdrawals and declines in asset prices,” which value the units potentially hundreds of millions of dollars below what AIG had hoped to get for them, the newspaper adds. The aim is to sell off the units by May, the newspaper adds, but the stricken insurer could pull out of the auctions altogether if it believes the bids are too low.

In other news, William Black tells Bill Moyers that the federal government is afraid to tell the truth about the banks’ insolvency because

. . . they (the government–ed.) are scared to death. All right? They’re scared to death of a collapse. They’re afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we’ll run screaming to the exits. And we won’t rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it’s foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, “We just can’t let the big banks fail.” That’s wrong.

H/T Brendan for the link to the William Black story.

Share

Comments are closed.