Want to watch a couple of former Goldman Sachs executives squirm while they try to explain a cover-up? At 10am eastern, 1.27.2010, on C-Span 3, Timothy Geithner and Hank Paulson are going to be in House hearings about The NY Fed, AIG, Goldman Sachs, the SEC and ‘national security’. Click the C-Span 3 link to watch it streaming live on Wed.
For those that need a bit more information, Judge Napolitano speaks with Lew Rockwell about the ever growing mess that Geithner is finding himself in with thousands of emails that cover up just how Goldman Sachs was paid 100 cents on the dollar for AIG debt. (Among other items.)
AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.
“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”
