AIG

BaggyMonny

Yeah, man, I think that's a great idea. I didn't want to put all my eggs in the same basket so I came up with a fullproof diversified plan. Followed all the classic advice like never invest more than 5% into any one company. And split your funds into equity and bonds. I can't go wrong with this plan: **1. US Banking 10%:** Two rock-solid titans with Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. **2. Insurance 5%:** AIG is the largest insurance in the world! Zero risk. **3. European banks are reputedly even safer so 5%:** Anglo Irish Bank is my bet. **4. Industrial 5%:** GM because you can't go wrong with American classics. **5. Retail 5%:** Circuit City because of all this computer building boom and stuff. **6. Transport 5%:** Frontier Airlines. These low-cost airlines are just amazing cash cows! **7. Tech and energy 10%:** Solyndra & Joost. I know these amazing guys with really promising startups so decided to put take a stake in their companies. These Joker-cards are probably the ones that will turns us into multi-millionaires while the other assets grind more slowly. **8. Real estate 15%:** Got us a fabulous new house in Florida! 15% of all our funds in downpayment and then the mortgage is quite large. But hey, as they say, real estate always goes up long-term! You've seen these guys getting rich with property in the recent years, right!? **9. Fixed-interest 40%:** Following the classic 60/40 advice I'm putting 40% into Greek governmental bonds! We went to Greece once at it was such a nice experience! Germany was such a drag in comparison, so I'm not giving my money to those lederhosen idiots! I'm like, this is all buy-and-hold so I'm even going to peek at the balance for years, just like these weirdo Bogleheads say (who knows, maybe they're onto something!). So yeah, all the family's money is now in there, although wifey doesn't know anything about it yet. She'll be so happy once I'll tell her some years later, how rich and stable we all are. Probably tell when when the kids hit high school in 2012, and we can start planning their fabulous time in elite colleges!

banksy_h8r

You guys are too brave for me, I'm going to put my money in **AIG**. They're an _insurance_ company so if anyone is going to have a good handle on any risks it'll be them. Insurance companies are based on really good risk assessment, surely they'll be the safest place to be if things get bumpy. But nothing's going to happen because the ratings agencies would have flagged it by now. That's their whole reason for existing, they wouldn't jeopardize their reputation with inaccurate ratings for the debt products.

jhenryscott

They’ll be the AIG of AI era

CurrentAirline9065

$AIG just got rid of its life insurance branch that I wouldn't want anything to do with as they own long dated assets that are getting killed. And AIG has more room to grow as it is still recovering from 2008

CurrentAirline9065

$AIG $CB $PGR $MKL are cocking

CurrentAirline9065

I'm full porting AIG and BRK my recklessness has no bounds

peace2calm

AIG almost caused or made the 2008 much worse because they didn't have the money to pay out for insurance claims no?

Javier-AML

AIG.

asdf4fdsa

We should insure these so we're safe. Let's use some AI. Company will be named AIG (AI Groundig).

Much_Candle_942

LoL, okay.  No one thought AIG as insurance company won't be able to settle claims 

OmegaBaita

AIG

omg_cats

Says you - they say differently. Regardless net rev is up 25% yoy. People here are missing the forest for the trees: this is not a new idea. The 2008 bailouts also took equity and warrants. Some were winners (AIG) and some were losers (GM).

HaveAKlondike

AGI is the new AIG

Full_Pear449

We were one of the Investmant Banks Depicted in "THe Big Short." A more intersting and much more Technically POINTENT was "Margin Call"*,* they use a fictional setting to capture the generalized panic, MATHematical reality of the situation and moral ambiguity of that exact night. The Risk Management Scene in this movie is REAL. Reality was that ARM Mortgages were all the rage with little to no regard for the reality of a rising interst environment. Adjustable-rate mortgages peaked in popularity around 2005, accounting for roughly 36% to 45% of all U.S. mortgage originations before fueling the subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent foreclosure wave. Second catch was the very popular variant where borrowers could choose monthly payment types, including a "minimum payment" that was less than the interest accrued. This caused negative amortization—meaning the unpaid interest was added to the principal balance, increasing the total debt over time. Popular because home valuations were rising very rapidly and you would take this type of mortgae and resell your house before the first Rate Adjustment. Then we had this line of BS: Lenders widely offered "no-doc" or "low-doc" loans (stating income without verifying it), often called liar loans, combined with lax credit score and down payment requirements. So you really were not making 100K , you just told them you were and no one ever checked. Those loans were very popular with customers without a W-2 5 year history. Countrywide ( big ARM issuer) received preferential treatment and carved out highly specialized, "sweetheart" arrangements. Later during further congressional investigation it was revealed that this "special treatment" was bidirectional, forming a complex web of mutual benefits that ultimately contributed to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis The ML short was strictly based on their purchase of the subprime mortgage lender First Franklin Financial from National City Corp. for $1.3 billion. The purchase brought massive exposure to toxic mortgage assets, contributing heavily to Merrill Lynch's multi-billion dollar write-downs during the 2008 financial crisis. Simple to connect all the potential dangerous DOTS. Washington Mutual bought this subprime lender in 1999, which pulled the bank deep into high-risk mortgages.They were also issuing the very popular and in massive amounts of adjustable-rate mortgages with payments so low that the total debt increased every month. AIG was easy, their London-based unit sold insurance contracts called CDS on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which contained bundled subprime mortgages. AND, they owned a subprime mortgage lender called Wilmington Finance, which faced regulatory penalties in 2007 for ignoring borrower creditworthiness and charging high fees. Shorting LEHMAN , BEAR, were really easy because the entire STREET knew their exposure both in MBS TBA's , MBS pools, RMBS and CMBS and they tooooooooo LEHMAN acquired major subprime and Alt-A mortgage lenders Aurora Loan and BNC Mort. and by 2006 were collectively issuing $50bln MONTHLY in loans by mid [2006.In](http://2006.In) the CMO arena they had created many tranches using sub-prime collateral which will shortly stop pay P&I on those loans, hence LEH was not paying out that return to Customers who owned those bonds, DEFAULT was IMMENENT. Ans your carrying all the other pieces of crap you had created. Overnight borrowing cost were get real by now. One month , 2 BIG ASS chalk boards , thousands of pieces of colored chalk , curtains covering up everything, meetings well into the following mornings , many a day wore the same clothes from the day before, LOTS and LOTS of spray deodorant. We had a VERY large Balance Sheet once presented to the Firm, very little variance on return, could not lose anymore than 10%, and they monitored it hourly (LIVE P&L) , needed a Repo Facility that was not ours so no one knew anything and that facility could take on BILLIONS in Repo. OH, no hedge because when your short any upward movement means you have made a serious miscalculation. All in is exactly that ALL IN , no hedging your bets

Rodrock-NC

Interesting stuff. I'll listen to that podcast - thanks. Sounds like your desk could have been depicted somewhere in The Big Short. Curious how your desk figured out, at the time, it needed to bet against ML, AIG, Wash Mutual, etc. (with little to no hedge) -- thats rhetorical, not expecting an answer unless you feel like typing one.

apocal51

Bought AIG and Bank of America in 2007

Full_Pear449

Traded on a PROP DESK - RISK/ARB---we also had a FICC desk, Principal Strategies, Global Macro X FICC, A seperate Cross Currencies,and 3 other Desk were essentially HFT desk, Two desk were combined and joined our Asset Management side. The difference between today's Prop desk is that today's are Girly Versions of a Prop. We were not restricted to only day trading like today and we were not retricted to equities. We traded what ever we wanted. The really cool part was that we were in a glass enclosed room, seperate security cards and entrance, on the 4th floor of our building and the totality of all the desk was a CITY BLOCK The execution of the PROP Desk was after the Volker rule went into affect. It was designed to strip all Prop Desk from firms in 2010 but was finally accomplished by the end of 2013. The general purpose was to have every trading desk a part of the Firms RWA calculation. No longer can you have an OFF balance Sheet Desk, or any exposure like CMO Tranches you did not sell just sitting on a Blotter and not counted as a risk. This all came about when Basel 1 and Basel 2 came into affect and you needed, most of the time, to count them as a Risk to Capital and not just OH BY THE WAY WE ALSO OWN THIS.  IN 2008 we were significantly short ML< SLH< AIG< NATWEST, WASHINGTON MUTUAL, MBS INDEX, COUNTRYWIDE , and long as possible CDS. While we were long CDS the regular firm was selling them to the Street on a BIG SCALE. Since we could not deal directly with the our Firm we were buying them from a 3rd party. We were trading the firms money not customer , client money so there we were not guided by any SEC or FINRA regulations. I was short 10's and 2yr Treasuries on a GRAND SCALE, long MBS pools that were made before 1999, short anything that had Adjustable Rate Mortgages associacted , indexed or was in the security. Generally speaking ,on the firms books, you were expected to be hedged against your position. NOT us , we went unhedged which at times was dangerous. It was fun, educational,tense,required constant attention, and was usually on the desk from 6am to 9-10pm at night. Exepting FRIDAY's , our desk had a reasonably strict rule on FRDIAY -EVERYONE imcluding OPs, trading, and trade support , or anyone associated with the desk be gone by 7PM. Saturday was an all hands gone bu noon and NO SUNDAY. PERIOD. You should look at the pod cast from-- David Weisburd -E189- Inside Goldman Sachs Desk: Lessons from a TOP Trader. We extensively used WACC modifiedModels , way way to our advantage. We had our very own IBM i system that ran continuously variantions on a theme for any and every security even remotely associate with MBS

Worst-Eh-Sure

Bought AIG right before the GFC, that was fun. Bought Boeing a few days before the MAX planes started crashing along with the stock price. Then once I thought the price had flattened out, COVID came and dropped even more. Though Boeing is fine now since I dollar cost averaged all the way down and now I’m overall up (by a full 7%!). It still doesn’t feel like a winner.

Jealous_Archer_4522

*Guy from AIG joins board. AIG bigger disaster than ENRON. Dude is toxic.*

SoloOutdoor

Most of the worlds wealth is in this bullshit. Its never gonna fail. Just like when AIG went tits up... briefly.

Garbage-Disposal-938

Ok, great and fair question. Short answer: I don't know. But when important large entities need to be bailed out -- they *are.* I believe there will be some sort of special Treasury/Fed/Wall Street operation to provide liquidity. (Wall Street and intelligence agencies have a long history of cooperation/collaboration.) These folks have an infinite money printer. In the 2008 GFC, the big banks were too big to fail, so they were supported. Goldman Sachs (and other investment banks I think) had offloaded their exposure to MBS credit default swaps to AIG. AIG got into hot water, but its obligations were eventually taken care of by the government, the ultimate magical backstop. In my view, OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be somehow anointed and protected by ~~God~~ the deep state. And I believe that for the reason you stated: It makes no fucking sense. They shouldn't have gotten this far. And we can all see the access which Scam Altman and Dario Amodei seem to have to the highest levels of power in this country. Why is that? And again, as you mention, because our government believes there's some sort of AI arms race occurring, a race which we MUST WIN (tho we probably don't and can't and it doesn't even matter), they'll pull all kinds of bullshit tricks to keep these two AI entities alive in one form or another. They'll cover for their shenanigans by saying *it's a matter of* *national security.* And OpenAI and Anthropic have huge market share. They are key players in controlling what the US and even global population *believe is true.* Think about how valuable that is to government of both parties! Government is not gonna let these two entities die. They're far too useful! Government/Deepstate will make the players whole on their investments. Furthermore, government can use these two as leverage against the other two monsters they created a generation ago: Google and Meta. Well, that's my paranoid conspiracy theory view of this matter. I wish I had a good answer to your question. I hope I'm wrong about all of it. But I have a hard time looking at these two companies through the lens of pure capitalism. Maybe you can talk me out of it. It would probably do me good. I'm too conspiracy minded.

Intelligent_Royal_57

This is a bad argument man. Bear Stearns, AIG, Lehmen brothers to name a few. Lots of smart guys, that got greedy.

Solid_Resort6852

This is insanely irresponsible. This is how AIG went bankrupt... selling insurance w/o having the funds to cover the worst case scenario. Ask him, if his options ALL got exercised against him tomorrow morning, how much money would he have to come up with. Then shut his accounts down.

EaterofSnatch

An easy Google search could have answered this for you but here you go **Yes — fire protection existed long before modern taxation funded it, and it can still work without it.** ### How fire departments existed before taxes Organized firefighting did **not** start as a government tax-funded service. - **Ancient Rome**: Emperor Augustus created the *Vigiles* (a corps of about 7,000 men) around 6 AD. They fought fires, but earlier versions under Augustus used slaves. This was more of an imperial security force than a tax-supported municipal department as we know it. - **London after the Great Fire of 1666**: The massive destruction led to the birth of fire *insurance*. Companies like the Fire Office (founded by Nicolas Barbon in 1680, later Phoenix) insured buildings. To reduce their own losses, these companies hired and equipped their own fire brigades (often Thames watermen). They only fought fires at properties that displayed their company’s fire mark (a metal plaque showing which insurer covered the building). Multiple competing insurance brigades operated this way for over 150 years. In 1833, several merged into the London Fire Engine Establishment (still insurance-funded). It only became a public Metropolitan Fire Brigade in 1866. - **Colonial America**: Benjamin Franklin organized the **Union Fire Company** in Philadelphia in 1736 — the first volunteer fire company in the colonies. Members brought their own leather buckets and linen salvage bags. It was a mutual self-help association. Similar volunteer companies spread. Franklin also helped found the Philadelphia Contributionship (1752), America’s oldest successful fire insurance company. These groups raised money through member dues, fines for missing meetings, donations, lotteries, and grateful property owners. Cities sometimes gave minor support (exemptions from jury duty or road taxes), but the core was voluntary and private. - **19th-century U.S.**: Until the mid-1800s, almost all American cities relied on **volunteer** fire companies. These were community-based, often competitive (and sometimes rowdy), funded by contributions, benefits, insurance company support, and member resources. Paid municipal departments only became common after the 1850s–1880s as cities grew and steam engines required more specialized crews. **Key point**: For centuries, fire protection was provided by **insurance companies protecting their financial interests**, **volunteer mutual-aid societies**, and **private brigades**. Government takeover came later, driven by urban growth, politics, and the desire for uniform coverage. ### How fire departments can be built and run today without taxation The same principles still work. Here are practical, real-world models: 1. **Insurance-funded / risk-based protection** Insurance companies already have strong incentives to prevent losses. Modern examples include private wildfire defense teams (e.g., Wildfire Defense Systems) contracted by insurers like Chubb, AIG, and others. They deploy crews, gels, and equipment to protect insured high-value properties when wildfires approach. Historically, this is exactly what London’s insurance brigades did. 2. **Subscription / fee-for-service fire protection** In some rural or unincorporated areas, residents pay annual subscriptions for fire protection from private or independent departments. If you don’t subscribe, you don’t get service (or pay a high fee after the fact). Private companies have operated this way successfully (classic example: Rural/Metro in Arizona communities for decades, delivering lower per-capita losses than many tax-funded departments at the time). 3. **Volunteer mutual-aid companies** Still the backbone of most U.S. fire coverage outside big cities (over 70% of departments are all-volunteer or mostly volunteer). They fund equipment through fundraisers, donations, membership dues, and sometimes limited local support. Communities that value the service support it voluntarily the same way they support churches, clubs, or charities. 4. **Private contracting / industrial brigades** Large facilities (refineries, factories, airports) maintain their own professional fire brigades paid for by the company because the specialized risk demands it. Cities can also contract with private providers for service instead of running their own departments. 5. **Competitive private providers + mutual aid** Multiple private or subscription-based departments can compete on response time, training, and price. Mutual-aid agreements (voluntary cooperation between neighboring providers) handle large incidents, just as they do today between public departments. **Bottom line**: People and businesses already pay for fire risk through insurance premiums. Historically and today, those who bear the financial risk (insurers and property owners) have strong incentives to organize effective protection. Volunteer mutual aid and direct subscription models further prove that taxation is not required for fire protection to exist and function. The transition to tax-funded monopoly departments was a political and administrative choice, not an inevitable necessity.

Spac55

Leverage unwind is more painful than anything. Size of AI debt , Too Big to Fail ? At GFC-2008, $AIG Lehman, $BAC $C $MS $GS struggled to survive in 2008. “Situational Awareness “ blow up $45 Billion for leverage. All datacenter on debt load is worse than CDO of CDO Look market cap of semi and many cash burning Zombies or even all semi. $SPY $QQQ $SMH $MU $NVDA https://preview.redd.it/ikjp07kvkuih1.png?width=752&format=png&auto=webp&s=fb5597e1e9465f40af3f2a0fcea2edd0587705e7

zeebjii

Lehman Brothers was rich too in 2007.So were GE, AIG and Citibank.

jcpopm

People have seen the growth of the Mag7 in the past decade and thus conclude that buying a company and never looking at it again is the best strategy. People still do that with the megacaps, not realizing that the past growth can't possibly be replicated given the sheer size of the corporations. In regards to the "buy and hold for 20 years" strategy seen so often here - if you adopted that strategy 20 years ago to now with some of the biggest / most popular corporation of the time you missed out enormously if you didn't actively manage your positions and should have just gone with the S&P. Citigroup is 70% lower than it was 20 years ago. Pfizer was the largest pharma company in the world 20 years ago but if you held it through to now you made exactly zero percent return. Walgreens was a blue chip that lost 70% and then went private forcing you to sell shares. GE, even if you count the GEHC and GEV spinoff, is up 2x in 20 years. Exxon? 2x. Cisco? 3.5x. If you took the top 10 companies by market cap 20 years ago and bought and held them to now, the index would be badly beating you and two of your positions would have been completely wiped out (Citi / AIG). In fact, of those companies only MSFT significantly best the index and WMT ran par with the index.

silicon_replacement

The bakers the AIG,

patrickthunnus

Typically one must replace value in a collateral position when it sinks in value with another asset. This could be a liquidity crunch, it's what sank AIG in '08.

Gimli_Son-of-Cereal

When you’re government bails out GM, Chrysler, Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, AIG, etc.. out of bankruptcy instead of letting them fail and have others rise to take their place, you don’t live in a capitalist society.

Spac55

After BearStern bailout, $AIG, $WAMU , Lehman one by one. $SPY $QQQ $SMH $XLC $XLK $XLY Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund bailout last week. Situational Awareness by June 2026 his fund was worth $45 billion How much today ? Fully liquidated Margin debt, 1.5 Trillion https://preview.redd.it/sua4c64y9dhh1.png?width=776&format=png&auto=webp&s=0fddf8265f61db9061505235eab48cc1ca46aeed See how crash wipeout at downturn

Spac55

After BearStern bailed out, Lehman, AIG one by one After $45 Billion hedge fund wiped out last week for AI, more hedge funds one by one next watch

FailingEfficiency

A financial crisis requires stress on the banking sector and bad loans. Stock market down, therefore financial crisis is not a well reasoned position. I do remember what 2008 was like. Interest rates went up and there was a bunch of variable rate mortgages that reset all at once at higher rates. This led to a wave of defaults. The banking sector created new derivatives based on flawed default rates that spread this risk to most banks and then AIG insured the risk. As the defaults hit, banks stopped lending, meaning a company that was healthy and unaffected couldn’t get their normal short term (weeks) loan to manage cash and payables. Missing a payable means you’ve defaulted, which leads to a domino effect of bankruptcies throughout the entire economy. This led to the stock market falling. The financial crisis led the market lower. Where is the financial stress in this market?

vexingparse

I do believe that some of the current incumbants will still be highly relevant in 25 years, but here are the top ten from 26 years ago (year 2000): GE, Exxon, Pfizer, Cisco, Citi, WalMart, Microsoft, AIG, Merck, Intel. Only Microsoft is still in the top 10 today. Granted, none of them (except perhaps for GE) were the sort of broad based conglomerate that dominate the top 10 today. None of them (except for Microsoft) was a platform company. So yeah, maybe you're right that things have changed. I would argue though that the main driver of churn in the top 10 is technological change. Is it likely that technological change in the next 25 years will be less than in the previous 25 years? Currently, the pace of change seems rather brisk.

Spac55

Every time $NBIS, $CRWV, $MRVL. Close to broke, or under water, $NVDA. Give 1-3 Billion cheery to pump When $NVDA go crash hard, who give cherries to $NVDA, like $AIG or Lehman like collapse

bigbeak67

Buffett has always liked to hold a lot of cash, it makes him very popular with traders who get into trouble. AIG asked him for a ballot in 2008 since he was the only one who really had the cash, but he said there was no way and they were too cooked for him to be able to help. BRK will hold because it's good leverage in their relationships.

Nickeless

Member AIG in the financial crisis? I member.

noflames

This sounds eerily similar to stuff I was hearing in 2005/2006.... Ironically, one of the reasons why AIG got bailed out was because the Federal Reserve was concerned state insurance commissioners starting to declare AIG's operating subsidiaries as insolvent, setting off a chain reaction as these operating companies were guaranteeing each others' liabilities.

Mail_Order_Lutefisk

I had six years of loss carryover from Lehman, AIG and C spanning 2009-2015. The Lehman bonds got rolled into something else that now shows at 5 cents value per bond that is listed as a CUSIP that is the first position in my ETrade account. It has stared at me every single time I have opened the account since 2011. 15 years of reminders of my abject failure. I can’t get a bid, can’t get them to remove it. Just a “welcome to the casino, Regard” reminder every single time I log in. Guh. 

brucekeller

Historically, bubble pops started with large drops of well-known companies that were part of the bubble. Like [Pets.com](http://Pets.com) in 2000 and AIG for 2008. Of course there was Lehman, WAMU etc., but AIG kind of exemplified a good bit of what had created the 2008 bubble and it's fun to look at its chart from back then. Maybe IBM won't be the canary in the coalmine, but imo it's a candidate right now.

DistributionBroad173

The AI bubble burst will be like the dotcom bubble of 2002. The 2008 bubble was worse, that was real estate and mortgage backed securities, CDO, Collateralized Debt Obligations. The financial wizards on Wall Street sold them all over the world and crushed the economies of Iceland and Ireland. People were buying real estate with Adjustable Rate Mortgages, in the hopes rates would come down. oopsie, the ARMs reset to new higher mortgage payments and people could not afford them. default default default default default. MBS and CDO all of a sudden became almost worthless. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns went bye bye. AIG insurance company took a MAJOR hit. AIG was deemed to big to fail, but AIG tried. I am planning on exiting my 401k and IRA equity mutual funds by October/November/December 2028. I think the next crash is in 2029. I will ride my dividend stocks as they will pay me while I wait it out.

Already-Price-Tin

Yeah, it's true of plenty of individual companies. Yesterday's darlings can be tomorrow's stagnant zombie-like companies that won't ever die but won't grow, either. The 2008 crash killed a bunch of companies and financial institutions. It caused 80+% losses in a bunch more, many of which still don't come anywhere near their 2006 valuations, 20 years later. Citi plummeted in 2007, and even with the last few years of growth, is still about 65% down from its peak. AIG is still down 90%. And those are companies bailed out by the government. Investing in the entire basket mitigates that risk a lot, especially if a new sector comes roaring past the others (e.g., tech in the past 30 years, volatility and all). But it's also always possible that something affects the entire basket at the same time (currency risk, macroeconomic risk, full blown wars/revolutions), so the risk is never zero.

Blackhawk149

This has AIG written all over it bailout.

CarrierAreArrived

yes, I remember vividly hearing the news that AIG was going under. Not caused by repealing Glass-Steagall though. I think it was CFMA.

Invest2prosper

Did you know that insurance companies were acting as quasi unregulated banks and heavily involved in insuring garbage mortgages. AIG nearly brought down the entire mortgage with CDO squared derivatives.

RIP_Soulja_Slim

>Burry, Frontpoint, and Brownfield made their profits by selling their swaps as they thought there would be a chance that the people on the other side of the trade would be insolvent and not be able to pay. Is that a correct statement? A CDS is best thought of as an insurance product. You buy it, it raises in value depending on where the default rates go. The higher the rates, the higher the value of the contract. Basically an insurance against loss. Theoretically waiting would have resulted in a higher payout, but there was legit concern that said financial institutions would not be able to make those payouts, so most of them cashed in a bit earlier than they could have. Worth noting that the largest writer of CDS was AIG, so these fears weren't exactly unfounded. >What really happens when a private/non-agency MBS/CDO collapses and the market price goes to $0? This doesn't really happen, for the reasons you outlined. Even at it's peak MBS defaults were single digits. The issue is market value, in a panic environment these bonds that were trading at 100 were now selling for 90 cents or less on the dollar, many ended up being worth full value over time. But let's say your bank has threshold for a 5% variance in book, a 10% variance in a few weeks is astronomical volatility. That's what killed a lot of banks, book value losses creating insolvency from a loan to value standpoint. >At the end of the movie, Christian Bale's character said he kept 1 swap just to see if it would pay out. Does anyone know what happened? I don't, but given how much artistic license the movie took I wouldn't be shocked if that was entirely made up.

Antique_Hawk_7192

This time it's datacenters. All that debt going into them, when even a single one defaults, it's gonna make 08 look tame. 08 had something to bail out. Govt could deal with all those MBS/CDO, it could stop AIG from defaulting. What they gonna do this time? Shovel boatloads of cash into Nvidia for buying GPUs to rot in warehouses? AI bubble is Bank/VC/Private Credit/Private Equity funnelling money into OAI/Anthropic and their users, and datacenter builders(Coreweave, Oracle). There's nothing and no one to bail out in this mess.

TheBeckofKevin

Here was his full comment: The funny thing about hyper-inflation is that while the nominal (listed price, how many dollars to trade) value of your outstanding liabilities becomes worth vastly less in real monetary value (the hypothetical "true full value", if currency was perfect), making it easier to pay back those loans or capital expenditures which might exist on your S-corp balance sheet, it also means that that the real value of the assets (i.e., collateral) underwriting the financing and insurance policies, which "lubricate the cogs in the machine" of your business, basically dries up. So, some enterprising idiot CEO/CFO might think that triggering high inflation on their Common Stock Class A/B/C better enables them to issue stock buybacks to stabilize the premiums on the financing they use for their payroll and operational cap-ex; but it also creates issues in the larger system which transforms their liquid assets into highly illiquid assets- nobody wants to trade Meta Class C stock options directly for futures contracts on Brent Crude unless there's a 50% markdown-to-market on pricing those options, for example. If there isn't enough liquidity for the assets you have on hand, eventually your financing and insurance gets re-priced at the end of the fiscal quarter, and you can influence those number by your nominal (but not real!) value of the assets. If you're buying back your own stock, you effectively control the price just by the volume of how much stock you buy back. Every 50-70 years, after enough institutional churn for the people who were there to forget about the last time it happened, some banker thinks they'll try the inflation trick, thinks that they can control it, and ultimately fails, creating widespread discord and inefficiencies in the market systems that can be exploited for arbitrage. This was the central point behind the failure of Lehman Brothers and AIG in 2007. Same as in the 00s, same as every market collapse before that. The real effect is that physical dollars cannot be printed in the quantity needed to fulfill both your payroll liabilities and your bank financing liabilities, so then the ATMs just stop dispensing money. Well, think about it with some critical analysis, and just assume all players in the game are evil greedy little goblins who need bigger net worth values to fill the void in their soul where they know nobody loves them, and further know that they're fundamentally unwilling to change anything about themselves to actually facilitate their socio-economic status. They maintain maximal control over the one thing they think matters the most about determining their social status, their pocket book, comprised from loans from banks using the underlaying stock options as collateral, not their salaries (exorbitant as those salaries may be). A corporation can report a nominal value of their stock trades as gross revenues on your quarterly balance sheet. You can have record profits you report weekly in terms of your (nominal, but not real!) liquid share price on the open market, but still have actual realized losses of real value that don't even show up on your books for several years. You do technically report those real losses to the bank that financed your business liability insurance, payroll, majority-stake of common stock IPO, etc., whenever you need them to front you the money for you to actually pay anybody, typically every fiscal quarter if not every month. However, when they're in the same game as well, the system functions through everybody's willful ignorance of what's actually going on (preventing real-price discovery) in the market. So how do you offset those realized losses? By reporting record (nominal) profits every quarter to continue to drive up the Earnings-Per-Share statistic on your SEC forms to bait trading algorithms into inflating your stock based on momentum. The problem, is that in order to have any real value that you can trade for a real asset (idk, like a cement truck for your underground doomsday bunker), is that you need this stock price momentum to stay above the compounding inflation target, because the difference in the percent change of your stock vs percent-change of inflation month-over-month is the actual trade-able value to the bank who holds the liability for your stock options. This has an externalized feedback loop, though, because a corp buying back its own stock using Fed Reserve banknotes reported on your fiscal quarterly balance sheet itself causes artificial demand-push inflation of the nominal "paper value" of the stock traded at the market exchange, which results in exponential (or at least non-linear) diminishing returns on the value you get for stock buyback programs. Essentially, the American market economy has been on a Weekend at Bernie's spending spree since around the Nixon admin. Gotta pay for all that Agent Orange somehow. If the metaphorical fleshy dead grandpa finally falls apart due to overuse, then you have much bigger problems anyway, including full insolvency of the US Fed Gov, inability to finance the Fed Gov through the open-market auction of Treasury Bonds, and inability to facilitate infrastructure or law enforcement of any capacity, meaning that the Fed Gov effectively loses the "monopoly of the state on violence". Usually, when that happens, in most governments since the dawn of written history, you stop talking about the price of bread and start talking about what double-digit proportion of your population has been murdered or raped per year (see Sudan for an example of this). So, yeah, sure, record profit in nominal value. But in real-value terms, a corp's consumer base has shrunk by half, and the other half does not in fact have infinite money. And so, by the clockwork of ineptitude, the market undergoes a "real-price discovery event". And children go hungry.

atropear

The movie is a cover up for what really was happening. Look at the origin of AIG and you will have an idea.

acu

Good point on the bailout flip. It genuinely is ironic. US rescued AIG, Citi, GM, SVB depositors, Boeing forever. China let Evergrande collapse with $300B in liabilities, plus the whole EV graveyard. Imagine the US letting Lehman and GM fail without TARP. Wouldn’t happen. Two things though. China bails out plenty, just quietly. Local government debt gets rolled constantly, zombie SOEs from the 90s are still on life support. So it’s more “private firms can fail, state-adjacent ones get saved.” Not that different from the US bailing out the politically connected. On regulation, that’s where I’d push back. US regulation runs through published rules and courts. You can sue the SEC and win. China’s version is Party discipline and discretionary enforcement. Didi IPO’d in NY in June 2021, regulators destroyed it by July for not waiting. Jack Ma made one speech and Ant’s IPO died two days before listing. No appeal, no court. That’s not regulation, it’s political power dressed up as it. So yeah, both systems pick winners. Americans just lie to themselves about it. The mechanisms aren’t the same though.

churningaccount

He was super critical because he was (and is) against protectionism. He’s on the record saying that AIG, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should’ve all be let to fail completely. And then he is also against all the QE that took place to take those troubled assets onto the balance sheet of the Fed. I can personally see both sides. It probably would’ve led to a much longer and deeper recession. But now we unfortunately have the precedent that you can do stupid or risky stuff and then just be rescued by the government and the Fed if you’re big enough.

Last_Cauliflower3357

APO. The private credit narrative is just that, a narrative. The company has no significant exposure to software but was still battered due to the light association with BDCs. I oddly timed the market apparently as I bought at 108. I also like AIG. It still has some stink on it due to the GFC and there are concerns about the exit of Zaffino, but the new CEO was a rockstar at AON. I don’t think it makes sense that this is extremely undervalued vs Chubb and Travelers on a P/B measure (AIG trades at 1x vs 1.7x of Chubb).

harrison_wintergreen

i understand your frustration on one level. but on another level it's hindsight bias. you could have been invested in Enron or AIG or some other company that crashed and burned, and selling to get some cash in a crisis was the smart move.

harrison_wintergreen

not sure why this was downvoted, it's an honest question. > Is there any stock that just never recovered? well, let's define 'never recovered'. (1) there are companies that just go out of business and disappear. examples include: - Sears, once the top American retailer and part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The entire company collapsed in slow motion and the stock became worthless. - Lehman Brothers, an investment bank started in the 1800s that went bankrupt. - Washington Mutual largest bank company bankruptcy in US history at at that point. - General Motors, once the top stock in the S&P 500 but the company declared bankruptcy and original stockholders were wiped out. GM stock now is a different company legally. (2) there are companies who stay in business but their stock deteriorates far below their peak and never recovers. AIG, the insurance company and Cisco the IT company come to mind, they were both major players in their industries. Cisco is very dominant and well managed, but the stock still hasn't recovered from the dot com crash. look up a chart of AIG stock There's a tiny company called NL Industries that used to be part of the Dow under the name National Lead before people understood how toxic lead could be. Also Goodyear; Xerox and Kodak were once hot technology stocks of the day, in a sense, because 60 easy photocopies and instant cameras were revolutionary.

NYGiants181

AIG is too much for me. I stick with my QQQM. Hold it for years.

liverpoolFCnut

It was a combination of a lot of things that had been brewing since the 80s which eventually blew up. But it was made much worse because of Greenspan keeping interest rates low and pumping up the asset prices, which was his favorite passtime. Repeal of Glass-Steagal, synthetic derivatives, AIG's backstop of everyone in the financial markets all played a role.

SPQR0027

After LEH imploded from no bail out: AIG got bailed out the next day. Government placed Fannie & Freddie Mac under "conservatorship". TARP was created within three weeks. The auto industry got bailed out. There is no fear of "moral hazard" in D.C. these days.

BreatheMyStink

AIG before the bailouts started in 2008

Bravadette

AIG, MRNA, MOS, PYPL, TTD, according to Google Finance

ohgodthehorror95

During the 2008 gfc, AIG wrote a lot of those claims. And the outcome by letting them default would've been so catastrophic that the gov bailed them out. There were a lot bs bailouts that likely never should've happened, but bailing out AIG was the right call. If shit hits the fan again, and assuming a private credit crisis becomes a "financial contagion" like the banks in 2008, I'd imagine they'll get bailed out again. Not because they want to bail them out, but because they basically *have to*.

literallymoist

AIG, there's a name I haven't heard in a while. I t-boned a Maserati insured by them in 2006, was hounded by them via mail for months. Thought the reason they let me go was that they realized I was broke. This comment makes me wonder if the reason is actually that *they* went broke.

Hour_Flatworm3616

In February 2026, Blue Owl Capital offloaded a $1.4 billion loan portfolio to a group of buyers that included its own affiliated insurance partner, Kuvare Holdings. They sold to themselves. Does this remind you of 2008 and AIG?

Long-Aardvark-3129

>Was the effect of greed/the thought that “the housing market cannot crash” that strong to blind them from doing DD? No. For a serious answer there were more than one effects in play. Most people know about the MBS situation and focus on that, as well as the bad correlations and poor statistical arguments, but you also had a real income fluctuation in 2007 which caused people to lose jobs and therefore lose the ability to maintain these balloon loans. So it wasn't the risk buried in the securities but instead the risk buried in the employment market that caused the crash overall. Think of it like doing DD on Meta but not realizing that Meta is reliant on pineapples in Malaysia flowing freely because a pineapple famine there results in the foreign workforce collapsing due to scurvy from vitamin C shortage for some critical task. No one is going to think of this but it's things like that which cause these issues. >Did the banks check to see why Burry wanted a massive position in Credit Default Swaps and if his theory had any legitimacy before selling Burry his massive positions in CDSs that would result in the banks having massive losses when they paid off? Did the banks hedge their risk against their exposure to Burry’s (and other) CDS positions and if so, why didn’t their hedge position(s) work? Yes, but hedging this position was easy. Remember, what actually "broke" wasn't banks, it was **insurance**, specifically AIG. The banks were super protected which is why they didn't mind taking it on; they already could not blow up. Yes, some bank exposure did occur, but again most of it was consumed by AIG and other insurance companies which effectively had to be bailed out. The losers here weren't the banks, because they just passed the risk on, but AIG who should have stopped them from breaking VAR models. Essentially you have too much focus on one player, the banks, but the game itself is bigger: 1. The unemployment rate rose in 2007. 2. The banks were heavily insured so it was free money for them. 3. The insurance companies and fed oversight were weak(er) at the time so they just ponied up when it came time to pay up on the grounds that they "couldn't have seen it coming" because it was the banks that blindsided them. The retelling of the story is fun but not 100% accurate.

PineapplePop9333

If we had let AIG fail, we’d all be living in a different world now.

negative-nelly

Banks weren’t taking the long side of cds bilaterally or in synthetic CDOs. It was firms like AIG and other insurance companies that were providing protection. Banks ended up with a lot of inventory of (cash) bonds they couldn’t sell and had to mark down. That’s how eg UBS had a 50bn write down.

ins1der

The banks hedged with insurance. The insurers (like AIG) didn't reinsure so they got completely fucked and failed.

aleagueofhisown

The banks did hedge. They hedged with AIG but AIG didn't hedge correctly themselves. So AIG couldn't pay out the banks n caused the banks to fail

TaskTortoise

The problem comes at 3 level. 1. How performance and commission are measured for these bankers. They were not measured by how much loss they averted or how risk balanced is their portfolio. They were measured by how much money they brought in for the bank. Someone who is more risk adverse and not take those deals will be outshine by someone else who did. Those who did get better performance review, better recognition, better bonus, and more likely to be promoted. Other see that and copy their behavior. 2. Diffusion of responsibility/bystander effect. Everyone assume that if the problem is that bad, someone else will call out on it. BoA, JP Morgan, AIG, Lehman, WF, etc. all look at each other and assume its all fine cause everyone else is doing it. So everyone assume its fine. 3. No historical precedence. Risk and actuarial works off historical trend. However, prior to 2008, housing price trend rarely dropped vs prior year and there was no historical record of systemic default. Actuarial had no basis of comparison. Risk know that CDS can be tricky but the underlying asset is a house. They assume, at worst, that enough mortgage holder will sell their house and repay the mortgage before an actual default; avoiding the credit downgrade/credit event for the CDS. They didn't imagine that the housing bubble will collapse so much that so many mortgage will be underwater; triggering the default and credit event for the CDS. Take, for example, someone offer to pay you $1M per year for a $100M CDS on US T-bill. Sure, the treasury may have just announced the US may be insolvent, but do you believe US will default on T-bill? Likely not. Even if you do believe such a risk and say no, they will offer it to the person next to you then the person next to them. Eventually someone will say yes. That person got a 10% bonus on that and nothing happened for a year. Next year, someone offer $5M for $500M CDS on US T-bill. Someone else will take it. And it eventually snowballed.

WiseAce1

Greed but they did hedge with insurance. The problem was they all went bankrupt. The majority holder was AIG and we propped them up. It's more complicated but tried to give an easy answer

Hopeful-Goose-7217

All other institutions. Many banks in Germany and Iceland, pension funds, insurance companies (ahem AIG).

EntertainerDowntown3

They were making a lot of money selling credit default swaps because the thinking was the housing market couldn’t go down. They also hedged their bets by purchasing their own credit default swaps from AIG. When it started to go south and they couldn’t package up the loans to sell as mortgage backed securities anymore they were left with a lot of mortgages on their book which people were defaulting on and they were on their hook for the loss. Then they tried to call in the AIG credit default swaps they purchased as they went up in value by a lot but AIG couldn’t pay out as they didn’t have the money and didn’t hedge themselves either and had to be rescued by the government with a bailout. Basically banks thought they hedged themselves by buying their own cds but the company they bought them from (AIG) went bankrupt and couldn’t pay out bringing down the financial system because of it.

HarryCrushNuh

AIG has entered the chat

Prussia_alt_hist

You are directionally right and sloppily wrong. The strong part of the thesis is this: post-2008 regulation pushed credit intermediation away from banks and toward nonbanks, private credit, insurers, and fund structures that are less transparent and less liquid under stress. Banks are still tied to that ecosystem through direct lending, commitments, financing lines, and counterparty links. Moody’s data cited by Reuters says U.S. banks had roughly $300 billion of loans to private-credit providers by June 2025, another $285 billion to private-equity funds, plus about $340 billion of unused commitments. The IMF has also warned that bank exposures to nonbanks in the U.S. and euro area can exceed banks’ Tier 1 capital, and reporting around the IMF’s 2025 stability work put U.S. and European bank exposure to hedge funds, private credit, and similar nonbanks around $4.5 trillion. That part is real.  The other strong part is borrower quality. The IMF’s 2025 stability work did flag that more than 40% of private-credit borrowers had negative cash flow by the end of 2024, up sharply from 2021. Fitch’s U.S. private-credit default rate was 5.8% in January 2026 and 5.4% in February, with payment-in-kind features involved in a large share of recent default events. So the sector is not clean, and PIK accounting is absolutely capable of masking stress for longer than public markets usually tolerate.  Your analogy breaks when you jump from “vulnerable credit complex” to “this is 2008 again.” It is not the same structure. In 2008 the core of the system itself—bank balance sheets, broker-dealer funding, subprime securitization, and AIG-style guarantees—was directly loaded with assets that were widely misrated, mark-to-market sensitive, and financed short. Today the problem is more likely to be a grinding credit impairment and liquidity mismatch across semi-liquid funds, insurers, PE-owned borrowers, and bank credit lines, not an overnight collapse of the entire payments system. That can still be ugly. It is just a different failure mode. Reuters reporting over the past two weeks reflects strain, redemption pressure, markdowns, and tighter bank lending to the sector, not a proven 2008-style systemic seizure yet.  Some of your specific numbers are inflated or unsupported. Blackstone’s fund is not an $82 billion vehicle hit by $6.5 billion of redemptions, based on the reporting I found. Reuters reported that Blackstone’s BCRED saw $3.7 billion of withdrawals in Q1 2026, on an $82 billion fund, and Blackstone raised the withdrawal cap to 7% while injecting capital to meet requests. That is pressure, not a run.  The insurance claim is also overstated. Recent reporting put U.S. life insurers’ private-credit exposure at about $482 billion at year-end 2025, around 8% of total life-insurance assets, not 20% of the entire U.S. insurance industry’s assets. There are legitimate concerns around private ratings and capital treatment, but your figure is not credible.  I could not verify your “BlackRock CLO breached its collateral triggers” claim from reliable primary reporting. I did find Reuters reporting that CLO managers are trying to reduce software exposure because they fear downgrades and defaults, but that is not the same as a documented trigger breach at a named BlackRock vehicle.  The Deutsche Bank point is partly right. Deutsche disclosed a private-credit portfolio of about €25.9 billion, roughly $30 billion, and UBS research cited in Bloomberg said Deutsche had the largest exposure among European lenders to nonbank financial institutions. But “30% of its loans to NBFIs versus 8% European average” did not show up in the Reuters source I could verify, so treat that ratio as unconfirmed unless you can point to the UBS note directly.  Your Citi “systemic amplification factor of 14.8x” looks especially weak. I could not verify it from a credible bank filing, regulator, or major news source. What I did find was that exact language circulating in reposts of the same social-media thesis. Until there is a source, treat it as contaminated data.  The oil section is where you overcooked it hardest. As of March 22, 2026, Reuters had Brent around $112, after an 8.8% weekly rise, and other reporting put it near $119 at peak moments. Some physical grades outside Hormuz, especially Omani crude, traded above $150, and Saudi scenarios discussed the possibility of $180 if disruption lasts beyond April. But “oil went to $170 physical” is not a clean benchmark statement, and presenting it as the market level is misleading. The correct version is: benchmark crude is a bit above $110, some physical barrels have traded dramatically higher, and prolonged disruption could push prices much higher still.  The macro conclusion is plausible but not proven. The IMF, ECB, and market reporting all say the Iran war is raising inflation risks and weakening growth, making rate cuts less likely and in some jurisdictions reviving hike risk. That is bad for weakly cash-generative borrowers. But “the Fed is trapped” is rhetoric, not analysis. Central banks are dealing with a stagflationary shock; they are not mechanically unable to move.  Net assessment: Your core insight is good: private credit is a real stress transmission channel, banks are still connected to it, insurers are more exposed than the old “safe boring money” story suggests, and an energy shock is exactly the kind of thing that exposes fake coverage, PIK dependence, and refinancing fragility.  Your bad habit is turning a good structure into a tradeable certainty by stuffing it with half-verified numbers and forcing a perfect 2008 analogy. That degrades the argument. The clean version is not “this is 2008 again.” The clean version is: this is a slower, more opaque credit stress cycle with real contagion channels, real valuation games, and real macro accelerants, but the evidence today supports vulnerability and repricing, not yet a proven systemic collapse.  So the verdict is: You are wrong if the claim is “same structure, same inevitability, same immediate outcome as 2008.” You are right if the claim is “private credit has recreated credit risk opacity through different intermediaries, and the Iran-driven energy shock materially raises the odds that this gets stress-tested hard in 2026.”

caeseron

Well, im still 70% up on the AIG shares i bought around covid so im alright mate, will keep doing what I know works.

_Doomer_Wojack_

2008: bad mortgages into CDOs into banks into AIG. Nobody knew who held the risk. 2026: overleveraged private credit into CLOs into banks into insurance companies. Nobody knows who holds the risk. Except now you add $170 oil breaking every borrower’s cash flow while the Fed can’t cut because inflation is ripping. 40% of borrowers already have negative free cash flow. Funds are gating withdrawals. Blackstone just ate $6.5 billion in redemptions. Different decade. Same movie. TLDR: short the whole financial market

Full_Pear449

Bank do it all the time. I sleep very very well every night. Traded 25+ years for a Primary Dealer, you learn the ins and outs very quickly. Retired at 50, and yes, there were some hairy, scary days along the line. Worst was 2008-2010, we were short Leh, MS, ML, AIG, CS, DB, C, and a few others. The other play was CDO's, there were multiple ways to play that. BUT, intelligence and research prevailed.

Yoosanam

Circling bombs till they explode or possibly it is becoming too big too fail like old AIG

korben2600

Dimon's out here saying the cockroaches are coming to light. Lloyd Blankfein saying private credit is reminiscent of 2008 like 4 days ago: “I would be very aggressively marking to market, making people sell certain things that even if they’re liquid, try just to make sure you could.” Now this. The broader issue here is nobody really knows the extent of the derivatives market's exposure. Nobody knows if we have another AIG situation because our swaps regulator is snoozing. Private credit might not itself be the catalyst for a rout but we in polycrisis times now.

Basis_404_

So is Blackrock pausing private credit withdrawals this generation’s AIG or this generation’s Bear Sterns?

Les7X

Also, AIG smashed earnings and has amazing guidance: down 8%

ZealousidealLake759

Sam Altman putting in his restaurant order: "One 2008 Lehman Brothers + AIG Bailout per year, for the next 3 years please"

vanceraa

I mean it’s pretty standard that 10 trading days to revert to the mean is the norm for these offerings. General Electric did the same with BHGE, AIG did the same with AER. There’s no dilution of shares, it’s just shares changing hands.

hulks_brother

AIG. One of my first trades in 2008. It taught me that, yes, stocks can go down and never recover. It taught be about reverse splits. I keep if to keep me grounded.

Last_Cauliflower3357

Over the past year I’ve bought asset/capital heavy companies with no chance of being replaced by AI. Claude Work isn’t going to be making Pepsis any time soon. Josh Brown coined it as HALO stocks - High Assets Low Obsolescence this week on The Compound podcast and I feel that this is the theme of the market this year. I have like 60% of assets in long term World ETF that is just there forever and then I have 5 stocks - PEP, GOOG (which appears as the winner of AI at this point), RTX, AIG and TGT.

_bwhaley

Ahh?m, AIG. Nice:

DaemonTargaryen2024

Any time. It's a dangerous logical fallacy to conclude – with 20:20 hindsight – that picking the few best performing stocks means you should concentrate your portfolio. It's not remotely repeatable on a go forward basis. [https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/concentration-risk](https://www.finra.org/investors/insights/concentration-risk) [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-largest-sp-500-companies-over-time-1985-2024/](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-largest-sp-500-companies-over-time-1985-2024/) See Enron, Lehman, Kodak, AIG, Cisco, GM, GE etc.

AlvinoSh

Lets say you came up with this conclusion in 2005, the top 10 companies by market cap in 2005 were: Exxon,Microsoft,Citigroup,GE,Walmart,Bank of America,Johnson n Johnson,Pfizer,Intel,AIG (lol) This portfolio with dividends reinvested would underperform the SNP500, even if we chose to not include AIG because you may think 2008 cannot happen again. It would not be a "bad portfolio" but it would still underperform. The the next biggest company will not be included if you continue to only hold mag 7 for the next 20-30 years.

PlanetCosmoX

At one point Petro Canada was a private company where a significant amount of shares were owned by the Cdn Federal Government. Other allies have gone through a similar process. Here your list, you’ll notice that the US was already on it. Canada Canadian National Railway (CN) Government-owned Crown corp → IPO & full privatization (1995) Air Canada Crown corporation → privatized (1988); government later re-entered briefly during crises Petro-Canada Crown corporation → IPO (1991) → fully privatized (2004) → merged into Suncor Canada Post (Purolator) Canada Post (Crown corp) owns majority stake in Purolator (still today) Hydro One (Ontario) Provincially owned → partial IPO (2015) → government retained significant stake 🇬🇧 United Kingdom The UK is the case study for this model. British Telecom (BT) State-owned → privatized starting 1984, government initially retained shares British Gas (Centrica) State-owned → privatized in stages Rolls-Royce Nationalized (1971) → privatized (1987) British Airways State-owned → privatized (1987) Royal Mail State-owned → IPO (2013), government retained shares initially BP (British Petroleum) Government majority-owned post-WWII → privatized over decades 🇫🇷 France France uses partial state ownership aggressively. Renault Publicly traded, French state still owns ~15% EDF (Électricité de France) Public company with majority state ownership (now renationalized) Air France–KLM Publicly traded, French and Dutch governments both own shares Orange (France Télécom) Public company, state long retained a large minority stake Thales Defense firm, state ownership via government & Airbus 🇩🇪 Germany Deutsche Telekom Public company, German government remains a major shareholder Deutsche Post / DHL Former state postal service → privatized, state retained stake initially Commerzbank Government took large ownership stake after 2008 financial crisis 🇮🇹 Italy ENI (energy) Public company, Italian government retains controlling interest ENEL (electricity) Public company, state owns significant stake Leonardo (Finmeccanica) Defense & aerospace, majority government owned 🇪🇸 Spain Telefónica Former state monopoly → privatized in stages Repsol State-owned → privatized 🇺🇸 United States** (yes, even the US) The US pretends it never does this — but it absolutely does. General Motors Government took majority ownership during 2008 bailout → later sold shares AIG Government majority ownership post-crisis → exited via share sales Amtrak Fully government-owned but structured as a corporation Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac Publicly traded, under federal conservatorship 🇦🇺 Australia Commonwealth Bank of Australia State-owned → privatized in stages Qantas Government-owned → privatized Telstra Public company, government retained stake for years post-IPO

AJ_Grey

Obviously shooting for AIG's loss of -61.00 per share.

EmmaPersephone

P/E ratios will always be relevant to smart investors. Blue chip stocks average P/E ratio is currently at 24.33 for the Dow and 29.56 for S&P 500. AIG is a 40 billion dollar company with a P/E ratio of 8.36. Of the 3,500 listed companies There are only 12 publicly traded companies with a P/E ratio usually above 100. There are 178 companies that typically have a P/E ratio above 100. Here are the highest ones: Alnylam Pharmaceuticals P/E 1,460 Kratos Defense P/E 743.73 Celsius Holdings P/E 542.35 Datadog P/E 391.97 Tesla 377.33 Palantir Technologies 219.30 CVS Health 200.76

Last_Cauliflower3357

I’m going to buy some AIG. Fully loading up on boomer stocks.

tcmart14

Somebody get this man in charge of AIG.

Slabbed1738

Lol reading up on Warsh. He didn't want to cut interest rates in 2008, and helped lead the bailout of AIG. Also apparently he was the one that convinced trump he could buy Greenland. Now he wants to cut rates but reduce balance sheet 

stealthagents

AIG's situation is intriguing, especially with their restructuring efforts. It’s understandable why the market's hesitancy over CEO transitions and industry trends might concern you, but with strong fundamentals in place, the long-term outlook seems promising. If you're managing operations of your small business while staying updated on such investments, Stealth Agents can assist. Our team has over a decade of expertise in keeping workflows organized so you can focus on analyzing those investment opportunities.

Gene_McSween

Help Pick a new brokerage for 403b. I have a 403b at work with a limited number of choices for investment companies. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with any of them and was hoping the community might help me narrow down my choices. I have several investments (Brokerage, IRA, Roth, 403b, HYSA) with Schwab, Fidelity, FNBO, and American Century. American Century currently holds my 403b (about 15% of total). I am very unhappy with the funds available and performance, in short, I need to move. I have been very happy with Schwab (preferred) and Fidelity over the past 25 years, but they are not available through my workplace. My preferred investments are index ETFs (VOO, SWPPX, SWISX, SWLGX, etc.) as well as some GLD and about 5% cash. I'm not really interested in actively managed MFs as they tend to have higher fees. I don't really need to put any money in this fund into cash or gold as I can re-allocate at Fidelity or Schwab to balance my portfolio when needed. Below is a list of investment companies available to me. * American Century Services LLC * Ameriprise Financial / RiverSource * Aspire Financial Services * Confidential Planning – MultiChoice * Corebridge Financial (formerly AIG/VALIC) * Equitable (formerly AXA) * Fiduciary Trust Co. of New Hampshire (Formerly Waddell & Reed) * GWN / Employee Deposit Acct * Invesco OppenheimerFunds * Lincoln Investment Planning * Lincoln National * MetLife * Mutual Inc / PlanMember Services * NY Life Ins. & Annuity Corp. * Oldham Resource Group, Inc. * Orion Portfolio Solutions, LLC (Formerly FTJ FundChoice) * PenServ SmartSAV (formerly Foresters) * PlanMember Services Corp. * Security Benefit * The Legend Group * Thrivent Financial for Lutherans * Voya Financial (Natl NY) Please help me to narrow this list down for further research. I'm also open to other ideas that people might have, if there are any. When I started investing at 21, I knew very little and kind of just random picked. In the last 15 years of so, I've become much smarter about where to invest but I am an IT guy, not a financial guy. If this were IT, I'd say that I know just enough to be dangerous. All "advice" is welcome, but please do not flame me for being stupid in the past. No AI responses PLEASE. Thank you to everyone else who's willing to help!

AggravatingPage1101

If you want a quick pop then fine, earnings are likely to be pretty good considering it was a very good year from a cat perspective and the reinsurance market is very soft. The leadership change is largely seen as positive but I wouldn’t say the buyout is off the table. Chubb is run by the former CEO’s son, a notoriously ruthless psychopath who wants that company under his auspices before he dies. Also, AIG had to scramble to find Anderson after their first successor offer had to rescinded because he was fucking his assistant at Lloyd’s. It’s a messy org— not a long, that’s all.

AlwaysSilencedTruth

i also think Topicus will return more than AIG, simply because they can reinvest their capital at a greater rate.

Adi_San

Agreed AIG isn’t the premier P&C name anymore that’s why it trades at 0.85× book while Chubb trades closer to 2–4× depending on the year. I’m not arguing AIG is the best operator, just that it’s one of the cleaner value/re-pricing setups right now as underwriting stabilizes. New CEO transition has put to rest potential buy out.

AggravatingPage1101

AIG is not nearly the premier insurer it once was and its stock has generally traded sideways for over a decade and really since it met its TARP requirements. There is also a not insignificant percentage chance they get bought so this isn’t a long. Chubb is still trading at a discount compared to its intrinsic value with a way stronger balance sheet, leadership, and operating margins. But all insurers have lagged well behind the market so there are more attractive places to put your money.

ai-moderator

#TLDR --- Ticker: AIG Direction: Up Prognosis: Buy Shares / Calls before Earnings Catalyst: CEO transition panic was overblown, fundamentals are cheap vs peers, and underwriting improvements should lead to an earnings beat. Current Bag: 350 shares @ $72 (Thoughts and prayers included)