Why Are We Spending $50 Billion to Bail Out Euro Banks?
Yeah yeah. Fucking bonuses.
But the real news to come out of the latest AIG dustup is that American taxpayers have been ponying up billions through “AIG” to make foreign banks whole, 100 cents on the Euro.
AIG finally revealed its list of counter-parties (.pdf) — and it seems that roughly $50 billion has paid out to Europe’s (+Montreal’s) biggest financial institutions.
Sure. This is a global economic crisis. But from the earliest days of TARP there was debate about whether Treasury should be buying up the world’s bad-bet assets.
As I recall, the idea of U.S. taxpayers bailing out UBS seemed was a non-starter, politically, at the time.
Now we discover that AIG bailout has done just that. By design? It’s a question Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner should be made to answer.
Check out the numbers below* and ask yourself: Why haven’t the Europe’s central bankers been asked to put some skin in this AIG game?
[UPDATE: The HuffingtonPost is reporting that the Fed has been injecting hundreds of billions to foreign central banks, suggesting that Europe’s bankers may be in no position to share in bailout burdens.]
Deutsche Bank $11.8 billion
Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg $100 million
Calyon $2.3 billion
Rabobank $800 million
Societe Generale $11.9 billion
The Royal Bank of Scotland $700 million
Deutsche Zentral-Genossenschaftsbank $1.7 billion
Dresdner Bank AG $2.6 billion
UBS $5 billion
Bank of Montreal $1.1 billion
KFW Bankengruppe $500 million
Banco Santander $300 million
Danske $200 million
BNP Paribas $4.9 billion
HSBC $3.5 billion
Dresdner Kleinwort $2.6 billion
ING $1.5 billion
Credit Suisse 400 million.
* Numbers added quickly in my head from AIG’s several breakdowns; don’t quote without checking the math yourself.