For a brief moment you had a glimpse of how harshly financial people might be treated if Wall Street ever lost its political influence.
Jake DeSantis just wanted to know why the public perception ... was so different from the private perception of the people inside AIG FP, who actually knew what had happened.
It's unlikely that Obama did know what he was talking about, except in the broadest outlines. Nor, for that matter, did the people who had engineered the bailout. How could they?
Across AIG FP the view of Joseph Cassano was remarkably consistent: a guy with a crude feel for financial risk but a real talent for bullying people who doubted him. Every one of the people I spoke with admitted that the reason they hadn't taken a swing at Joe Cassano, before walking out the door, was that the money was simply too good.
It would be nice if Joe Cassano came out of hiding and tried to explain what he did and why, but there is little chance of that. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn't that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right.
AIG, knowing it would need to ask for much more capital from the Treasury imminently, decided to throw in the towel, and gifted major bank counter-parties with trades which were egregiously profitable to the banks, and even more egregiously money losing to the U.S. taxpayers, who had to dump more and more cash into AIG, without having the U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner disclose the real extent of this, for lack of a better word, fraudulent scam.
