This should make everyone take a look at the Fed................
Senators Ask Who Got Money From A.I.G.
The New York Times | 3/6/09 | Mary Williams Walsh
WASHINGTON — Trying to draw a line in the sand, a Senate panel told the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve to identify all the parties made whole by the bailout of the American International Group or forget about coming back to ask Congress for more rescue money.
“You will get the biggest no you ever got,” Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, warned Donald L. Kohn, vice chairman of the Fed board of governors, in a hearing on Thursday. “I will hold up the bill.”
The hearing, led by Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, was called to examine the regulatory patchwork that had allowed huge risks to build up at A.I.G. Since the insurance conglomerate’s near collapse in September, the federal government has committed $160 billion to keep it afloat.
Tens of billions of those dollars have merely passed through A.I.G. to its derivatives trading partners, shielding them from losses. The Fed has refused to provide the names of those financial institutions, and senator after senator, Democrat and Republican, said that was an outrage.
“We need to know who benefited, and we’re going to find out,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and the ranking member of the committee. “The Fed can be secretive for a while but not forever.”
Mr. Kohn said the Fed believed that the only hope of recovering the taxpayers’ money was to get A.I.G. back on its feet, doing business as usual — and that meant respecting its customers’ privacy.
“I would be very concerned that if we gave out the names, people wouldn’t want to do business with A.I.G.,” he said. But at Senator Dodd’s urging, he agreed to go back to the Fed and ask the other governors to reconsider.
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