By Dave Lindorff
AIG, the quintessential blue-chip, one of the 30 companies that
compose the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a company that in 2000
boasted a market capitalization of $217 billion, making it the largest
financial institution in the world, is teetering on the brink of
collapse. Worth just $7 billion today, the future of what was until
recently the world’s largest insurance company is hanging by a
thread—that thread being the willingness of Wall Street institutions
like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, themselves facing credit issues,
to come up with $75 billion in rescue loans.
It used to be that investors who were worried about financial
markets, or who didn’t like to take big risks, would put their money in
what were called “blue chips”—companies that were deemed conservative,
safe investments that could weather any storm. They had names like
AT&T, General Motors, Ford, Boeing…and AIG.
Well, AT&T is a shadow of its former self, GM and Ford are both
being talked of as dead men walking by analysts, Boeing is on
life-support, or, since it is being propped up by its military
contracts, more appropriately death support, and AIG, well, it’s
already got one foot in the grave.
There really are no blue chips any more. The largest companies in
the world, as Enron showed, can vanish overnight in a puff of smoke.
Look at Lehman Brothers. Here today, then, poof, gone tomorrow.
In AIG’s case, if the insurance giant goes under, it may take a lot with it.
An article today in the Australian daily The Australian (Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp flagship and hardly a Marxian rag) put it this way:
Should the US Treasury and Federal Reserve fail in last-ditch
efforts to secure breathing space for AIG, then sub-prime's cascading
woes will have slowly smashed financial markets into worse shape than
the legendary market meltdown of 1987.
And, from there, governments and banking regulators alike will have
to ponder the previously unthinkable: are we on the way to a place
comparable with 1929?
So what are anxious investors to do? Clearly there are no safe
harbors in the stock market, which could as easily drop 40 percent or
70 percent tomorrow as rise 3 percent. Bonds don’t look much better.
They may be more stable than equities, but not if the company that
issues them goes bust. Then they are worthless scraps of paper, no
better than the share certificates for Fannie Mae that are now being
used to line cat litter boxes. The ratings agencies, like
Standard&Poors, Fitch and Moody’s, while exercising their usual
timidity about downgrading a major corporate entity, have belatedly
knocked AIG’s credit rating down two notches today, which is their way
of hinting that if you are an AIG bondholder, you have a significantly
greater chance of losing your shirt.
Nor is it just investors who have to fear. Individuals who have
tried to protect their families by purchasing life insurance policies,
or who have sought to establish a secure retirement income by buying
annuities from AIG, need to worry about whether the company will be
around to make the payments when they or their beneficiaries need them.
Sure, the states, which are responsible in the US for regulating the
insurance industries, for the most part have established reserve funds
to backstop insurance carriers, but like the FDIC which insures bank
deposits up to only $100,000, these funds generally only back the first
$100,000 of insurance or annuity coverage as a “cash surrender” value,
or $300,000 as a benefit payout. But those state guaranty funds were
designed to protect people from failures of fly-by-night insurance
operations. They are woefully underfunded for companies on the scale of
AIG.
AIG is such a giant in the insurance business that as one corporate treasurer told The Australian:
“If AIG collapses, then the world doesn’t have insurance.”
The New York Times, commenting on fears among ordinary people that their insurance or their annuities may not be there when needed, quoted one insurance adviser,
Glenn Daily, who said a client who was an AIG policy holder was
borrowing the maximum against his life policy, planning to park that
money somewhere to see if the AIG crisis blows over. But he added
darkly, “If everyone does this, the company could be driven out of
business.”
Actually, it’s worse than that. As Michael Lewitt, a Florida-based money manager, wrote today in an opinion article in today’s New York Times,
AIG is a key player in the $60 trillion (yes that’s trillion with a
“T”!) credit swap default market, a huge, international and wholly
unregulated field in which hedge funds play, and whose collapse would
make the 1929 Great Crash look like a minor fender-bender.
So that’s what it’s coming down to. There are no Blue Chip refuges
from the rolling disaster that is the US economy today. And there are
no easy rescues—indeed according to one theory Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson let Lehman Brothers go bust because he knew he needed what
funds the Treasury has left to try to keep AIG alive. It’s all a
fragile, interconnected house of cards, propped up by a residual faith
among ordinary investors who, at least so far, still think it has some
kind of inherent structure to it. As card after card gets pulled out of
that rickety stack—first Bear Stearns, then IndyMac Bank, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then Lehman Brothers, now perhaps AIG and
Washington Mutual, a large savings institution that is on a death
watch—at some point those investors and now insurance clients, too, may
all decide to take their money and go home, and the whole thing will
come crashing down.
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