insurance geekery: AIG 'nationalized'
AIG isn't a household name, but I've directly competed against them for something like 5 years now. "900lb gorilla in the room" has always been an understatement when it came to AIG, their capabilities, and the size of their organization. Also they were never known for taking stupid risks, at least not at the level of the operating companies actually doing insurance. I can't stress enough that just a year ago this would have been almost unimaginable. People often throw around the phrase 'too big to fail', but I don't think anyone with some knowledge of credit and banking ever believed that to be the case for any of the mega-banks or investment banks. The phrase as they used it actually meant 'there's no doubt they would have to be bailed out'. But with AIG, an insurance company sitting on mountains of reserves, it really seemed like an adequate description; how could they fail with multiple highly rated insurance company balance sheets? So it's an astonishing thing and I think many people may not realize how crazy this is. When big, sexy, dangerous Wall St. banks started going down you saw it coming. But the whole point of an insurance company is stability, and this one was generally believed to be the most stable of all for a long time.
Anyway as they say 'it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good'... though it's generally bad news for prob any fellow American reading this it means more work for me, and hopefully a decent reward down the line.
Anyway as they say 'it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good'... though it's generally bad news for prob any fellow American reading this it means more work for me, and hopefully a decent reward down the line.