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Yet the outrage against AIG's reckless behavior and the federal government's reaction to it persists. NBC assigned Tom Costello to go over much of the ground CBS' Elizabeth Palmer covered Thursday in detailing the catastrophic consequences of AIG's Credit Default Swap trading at its London office, which was run by Joseph Cassano. In 1998, as Costello put it, Cassano "dramatically changed AIG's business, taking on huge risk, insuring other banks' debts, corporate investments, bonds, real estate deals and subprime mortgages, $2.7tr in so-called derivative contracts." That is what he said, two-point-seven trillion dollars.
It is that difference between the millions paid out in bonuses and the billions in federal bailouts caused by the trillions in contracts that Jeff Greenfield zeroed in on at CBS. Bailout funds were "paid out to some of the world's biggest financial players whose risky investments were insured by AIG and they were paid off in full--100c on the $1. Why?" To many of Barack Obama's centrist and liberal critics, Greenfield judged, his administration's financial bailout policy seems to have a "frame of assumptions" that is "kind of pin-striped, that Wall Street, the big shots, have to be protected." Thus Greenfield's reading of last week's 60 Minutes profile of Chairman Benjamin Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Board, in which he returned to his hometown of Dillon SC. It was "not on a whim--it was to show that he was not of Wall Street."
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