credit default swaps

For many people, one of the confounding things about the financial crisis has been trying to grasp exactly what happened on Wall Street — and how things could have gotten so out of hand. The financial press, in many ways, hasn’t been of much help here, throwing around terms like C.D.O.s and credit default swaps [...]

Too big to fail? Maybe. Too big to regulate? Not according to some lawmakers.
Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) introduced legislation today authorizing federal regulators to oversee the credit default swaps market — which has ballooned into a $57 trillion industry.

We know that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), burned by voter anger over his coziness with Wall Street, received only $4,250 in donations from actual residents of his home state during the first three months of this year.
That’s not great news for the embattled Dodd, who is fighting for his political life [...]

Reading the resignation letter from the former AIG executive who had nothing to do with credit default swaps but has been vilified regardless, you see the other side of the story, a way to feel some sympathy for top financial executives caught in the same crisis that’s dragging all of us down.
But then you find [...]

This resignation letter in The New York Times today from an AIG executive in the financial products unit explaining the bonus controversy from his point of view probably will be flying around the blogosphere today. In the letter to AIG CEO Edward Liddy, the executive, Jake DeSantis, says  it’s not public shame that prompted his [...]

Bailed-out insurance giant AIG will no doubt be a heated topic of discussion today, with The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations reporting that the failed and essentially insolvent company is vowing to pay out $450 million in bonuses to its “top performers” — you know, the folks in the financial products unit, many [...]

There are many  irritating aspects of the continuing bailout of  insurance giant AIG, a company that seems to be little more than entirely insolvent. Yet it continues to get billions of taxpayer dollars thrown at it. The biggest outrage, to me, is the Federal Reserve’s insistence that the identities of AIG’s trading partners should remain [...]

As the economy sinks toward recession and increased regulation gains support, lawmakers aim to tackle the elusive, unregulated derivatives market, with a focus on credit default swaps.

Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson saved AIG to avoid a brutal restructuring of the credit default swap market.