Mary Williams Walsh | Washington | November 16

NYT -
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York gave up much of its power in high-pressure negotiations with the American International Group’s trading partners last year, according to a government report made public on Monday.

Just two days before the New York Fed paid A.I.G.’s partners 100 cents on the dollar to tear up their contracts with the insurance giant, one bank volunteered to take a modest haircut — but it never got the chance.

UBS, of Switzerland, alone offered to give a break to the New York Fed in the negotiations last November over how to keep A.I.G. from toppling and taking other banks down with it. It would have accepted 98 cents on the dollar.

But UBS’s good-faith gesture was quickly drowned out by Goldman Sachs and the top French bank regulator. They argued, with others, that it would be improper and perhaps even criminal to force A.I.G.’s trading partners to bear losses outside of bankruptcy court.

The banks and the regulator were confident that the New York Fed was not willing to push A.I.G. into bankruptcy, because earlier in the fall the New York Fed had stepped in with $85 billion to prop up the insurer.

The New York Fed, led then by Timothy F. Geithner, who is now the Treasury secretary, therefore had little leverage in the negotiations, according to a post-mortem of what has emerged as the most inflammatory episode in the rescue of A.I.G.

The Fed “refused to use its considerable leverage,” Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, wrote in a report to be officially released on Tuesday, examining the much-criticized decision to make A.I.G.’s trading partners whole when people and businesses were taking painful losses in the financial markets.

Huffington Post: Geithner Singled Out In TARP Watchdog Neil Barofsky's Scathing Report On AIG Bailout

A brutal report issued Monday by a government watchdog holds Timothy Geithner -- then the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now the nation's Treasury Secretary -- responsible for overpayments that put billions of extra tax dollars in the coffers of major Wall Street firms, most notably Goldman Sachs.

The authoritative new narrative describes how, while bailing out insurance giant AIG last fall, a team led by Geithner failed nearly every step of the way.

Zero Hedge: Moral Hazard Defined; Goldman's Response To The FRBNY On AIG: "Let It Fail, We Are Insured"

Courtesy of the SIGTARP's latest report, the events on November 6 and 7th, when Wall Street lackey extraordinaire Tim Geithner decided to pay $27.1 billion to make all of AIG's counterparties whole, have attained even more granularity. The main thing disclosed is just how willing Geithner was to extract absolutely no concessions from AIG's counterparties, and how after putting in a token effort, the best he could do was to just get UBS to agree to a contingent 2% haircut, which would only be effective if all the other counterparties agreed to the same. Of course, this approach failed, and the final "make whole" bailout was a foregone conclusion from the beginning. That Tim Geithner approached his duty of "preserving" taxpayer capital with such disdain, would be grounds for immediately termination for cause in any normal, non-banana society. Alas, America has long ceased being representative of one.

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This, Mr. Geithner, is what moral hazard is all about. Thanks to your actions you have doomed the U.S.'s formerly free and efficient equity markets to the biggest capital market bubble in history, which, like any ponzi, has only two outcomes: it either keeps growing in perpetuity as greater fools crawl out of the woodwork to keep it growing, albeit at ever slower marginal rates (note, this did not work out too well for Madoff), or it eventually pops. And the longer it takes to pop, the greater the ultimate loss of value: one day Madoff's business was worth $50 billion, the next day it was $0. And that is precisely the same fate that American capital markets will have at some point in the upcoming months or years. When future historians look back at what specific action caused the biggest crash in U.S. capital markets history, Mr. Geithner's cataclysmally botched negotiation of the AIG counterparty bailout will undoubtedly be at the very top of the list. In the meantime, just like in the Madoff case where the trustee is trying hard to trace where any stolen money may have been transferred to, to see the fund flows in our ongoing "ponzi in progress", look no further than the bank accounts of Goldman bankers as they receive their biggest ever bonus this year (and, by many indications, last).