Treasury sells last of AIG shares ... AIG Bailout ends up in Fed profit

[Mr. Laz]

More business than Politics ... but whatever


Dec 11, 2012 12:24pm
Treasury Sells Final AIG Shares For $22.7B Total Profit

The Treasury Department today announced it has sold its remaining shares of American International Group, bringing the U.S. bailout profit to $22.7 billion and concluding the largest government assistance package of the financial crisis.

Four years after taxpayer support saved the insurance giant from the brink of collapse, the Treasury sold its remaining 234,169,156 shares of the company for $32.50 each, raising $7.6 billion.

“Giving effect to today’s offering, the overall positive return on the Federal Reserve and Treasury’s combined $182 billion commitment to stabilize AIG during the financial crisis is now $22.7 billion. To date, giving effect to the offering, Treasury has realized a positive return of $5.0 billion and the Federal Reserve has realized a positive return of $17.7 billion,” Treasury announced.

To put this huge figure in context. The $22.7 billion that taxpayers profited from the bailout is roughly the same as the 2013 discretionary budget for the Department of Agriculture. The Food and Drug Administration’s entire budget is only about $2.5 billion. The budget of the Internal Revenue Service is $13 billion. The US Postal Service is about $12 billion in the hole.

AIG nearly collapsed as a result of its bad bets on the housing market in September 2008, prompting the politically contentious massive taxpayer bailout, the largest in U.S. history.

[BucEyedPea]

Originally Posted by scho63

How ironic is this-the government is starting to make money in many of the bailout companies. The government continues to lose in all their investments in companies that were supposed to be promising in the green sector.

Go figure.......

Whether the govt profits or not, why should only select businesses be bailed out and not the rest of them? Govt is supposed obey the law and that is we have equality under the law. Apparently, the left is all for equality until equality needs to be applied equally.

[oldandslow]

Originally Posted by BucEyedPea

So what. There's still no authority for the Federal govt to be doing such things.

No authority to make the LA purchase either...so you all can just give it all back to us and we'll all be happy .

[alpha_omega]

Great...there is some extra cash to bail out the city of Detroit.

[BucEyedPea]

Originally Posted by oldandslow

No authority to make the LA purchase either...so you all can just give it all back to us and we'll all be happy .

That doesn't answer the question. It's a deflection...and a straw man.

[FishingRod]

Hey sometimes things work out. Not complaining about a good result.

[Iowanian]

Cool.

Now we can fund the failed solar companies.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by cosmo20002

This sarcasm will be accepted as a thank you to those responsible for avoiding another depression.

Speaking of which, we should probably revise the way we look at the "deficit" that Obama inherited since a large part of the spending attributed to Bush in that last year ended up being profitable investment as opposed to the "gone forever" style of spending favored by the current POTUS.