Mind Over Market

On December 9, C-Span's Washington Journal interviewed Janet Tavakoli, a Chicago-based structured finance analyst. She was in Washington to attend a conference sponsored by the Federal Housing Finance Administration. She talked about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, private label mortgage-backed securities, Wall Street fraud, and derivatives. See the entire 39:43 minute interview at this link: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/FannieMaean

The National Inflation Association has released another in its powerful video series warning of the dangers of hyperinflation from loose monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. Is it time to start hoarding? Or is this just fear-mongering?

This ascerbic and hilarious cartoon by Malekenoms is done in a question and answer format between two bears who speak with computer-generated voices and broken English. The first bear starts off the process by asking the second bear, "Did you hear about the Fed?" and then proceeds to explain to the second bear why the Fed is engaging in quantitative easing. The policy name "quantitative easing" is described as a euphemism for printing "a ton of money." When the second bear asks the first bear, why not just calling it "the printing money," the first bear responds that the Fed calls in quantitative easing because printing money is seen as "the last refuge of a failed economic empire and banana republics, and the Fed doesn't want to admit this is their only idea." The bears then belittle the notion that there is deflation when prices are rising everywhere. The the first bear also lampoons the Fed's credibility and claims it has bee...

On his CNBC show Friday October 22, Larry Kudlow touts Treasury Secretary's recent statements supporting the dollar with guests Jim Rogers and Andy Busch. They discuss the odds for a dollar rally after the meeting of the Fed on November 3.

The Joint Economic Committee worked four months putting together this graphic representation of how the new Obamacare works -- a graphic that is being featured in an article by Deroy Murdock posted on National Review . See the article at this link: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/250485/three-charts-will-infuriate-taxpayers-deroy-murdock You can download at high resolution version of the graphic at this link: http://www.jec.senate.gov/republicans/public/index.cfm?p=CommitteeNews&ContentRecord_id=bb302d88-3d0d-4424-8e33-3c5d2578c2b0 It's one of three charts that Murdock says "will infuriate every taxpayer."

Prof. William Wheaton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expects the housing market to come roaring back in the next few years. He gave his views today on CNBC's Squawk on the Street. The reason, he explains, is that household formation is creating demand that is far greater than the current rate of new home construction. Foreclosures and excess inventory are not so much of a problem because they are filling in the demand between new home construction and new household formation. The market is poised for a comeback even without the range of mortgage products that existed prior to August 2007, the professor says. He points out that in the past people were able to buy homes before the new mortgage products were available.

The Federal Reserve has released its Flow of Funds report for the second quarter of 2010. Household net worth declined $1.5 trillion to $53.5 trillion. Household net worth in the second quarter of 2010 had risen $4.7 trillion from the trough in the first quarter of 2009, but still off $12.3 trillion from the peak in 2007. At the First Quarter 2009 trough, the loss in household wealth had declined $17 trillion from the 2007 peak. With home prices expected to be headed for a double dip, these trend lines may head back down again. In the chart above net worth of households and nonprofits is expressed as a percent of GDP. This includes real estate and financial assets (stocks, bonds, pension reserves, deposits, etc) net of liabilities (mostly mortgages). Read more of an analysis of the trends in household wealth at The Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/household-net-worth-2010-9#ixzz101zh0bCN The Flow of Funds data can be found at this link: http://www.federalreserve.gov/re...

On September 17, Home Depot chairman and chief executive officer Bernie Marcus appeared on The Squawk Box on CNBC. He was interviewed by show host Joe Kernen. Marcus lambastes the "academics" who have positions of power in Washington (including President Obama) and their view of job creators as "monsters" and "villains." Marcus facetiously "apologized" for creating 320,000 jobs. Marcus, verbatim: Now you take some of the people the President surrounded himself with, now think about it a second, they’re all academics . . . most of them . . . I mean all of them, they come out of Harvard they come out of Yale. These guys are all on tenure. By the way they’re all on tenure. Tenure means they get paid whether they work or not, tenure means they are on insurance for life, tenure means they don’t ever have to worry about anything just because they were there for a number of years. America is not that way. America is not that way. And if the President go...

In an interview by Larry Kudlow, Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) explained why the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress are not worried about the huge run-up in the deficit and rising national debt. In his September 9 program host Larry Kudlow pointed out that the Obama Administration has increased the national debt by more than all prior Presidents from George Washington through Ronald Raegan. When Senator Gregg suggested this was going to bankrupt the nation, Larry Kudlow disagreed. “Senator, instead of going bankrupt, you know what will happen?” Kudlow said. “It's a massive tax trap. That's what's going to happen. It's going to be a gigantic humongous, massive tax trap that will doom us to subpar, stagnant, slow economic growth and high unemployment. Isn’t that really the issue?” “Larry, you're absolutely right,” Gregg responded. “This is a very important point for your viewers to understand. This spending is being done intentionally. The reason the GDP –...

Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) went to extraordinary lengths to reach across the aisle to forge a consensus financial regulatory reform bill. After making considerable progress in a cooperative effort at crafting a bill, Senator Corker's efforts were cast aside. Instead, Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) went ahead with a purely partisan bill that, only with very minor compromises, obtained enough Republican support to pass. This is another legislative behemoth that will have enormous unintended consequences. Read an interview with Senator Corker and his views on his experience and the new legislation at this link: http://robertstoweengland.com/index.php/writer/436-senator-corker-qaa

Thursday, August 19, the day that Treasury and HUD held a conference on the future of mortgage finance -- including the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who fought belligerently and vindictively against anyone who tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie for more than a decade, was on CNBC and Fox Business trying to rewrite history. This clip gives some insight into Barney Frank then versus Barney Frank now. Can Barney Frank ever have a conversation that does not include ridicule of and sneering at people who disagree with him? This video was put together by Barney Frank's opposition in the upcoming election, Sean Bielat. Read more at http://www.retirebarney.com/ .

Congressional Budget Director Doug Elmendorf writes on the Director's Blog at the CBO web site: Federal Debt and the Risk of a Financial Crisis In fiscal crises in a number of countries around the world, investors have lost confidence in governments’ abilities to manage their budgets, and those governments have lost their ability to borrow at affordable rates. With U.S. government debt already at a level that is high by historical standards, and the prospect that, under current policies, federal debt would continue to grow, it is possible that interest rates might rise gradually as investors’ confidence in the U.S. government’s finances declined, giving legislators sufficient time to make policy choices that could avert a crisis. It is also possible, however, that investors would lose confidence abruptly and interest rates on government debt would rise sharply, as evidenced by the experiences of other countries. Unfortunately, there is no way to predict with any confidence whether ...

The atrocities of the Soviet Union have largely been ignored by history. But, thanks to this award-winning documentary, people can now begin to learn that the Soviet Union committed mass murder and atrocities on a scale that dwarfs that of all other ideologies, states and systems in the history of the world. The deliberate starvation of seven million Ukraines in a single winter of 1932-33 was known to a New York Times correspondent who, instead of reporting it, covered it up. That would make this the single most horrible act of complicity with evil in mankind's history. This is an astonishing video that should be widely disseminated. More on the documentary at this site: http://www.archive.org/details/TheSovietStory The Soviet Story is a 2008 Latvian documentary about Soviet Communism and Soviet-German collaboration before 1941. It was written and directed by Edvins Snore and sponosred by the Union for Europe of the Nationas group within the European parliament. The EUN function...

More than 40 percent American workers face the prospect of having too little income in retirement and are likely to run out of money, according to a new study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). The share of the population segment at risk for an inadequate retirement ranges from 70.3 percent of households with incomes in the lowest one-third of the population to 41.6 percent in the middle income group to 23.3 percent for the highest income group. Surprisingly, given the difficulties from the financial crisis and the recession, the results find workers better prepared for retirement than a similar study conducted seven years ago. In 2003, by comparison, 79.5 percent of households in the lowest one-third of income were at risk, falling to 47.3 percent for the middle income households and 39.6 percent of the highest income group. Defying the expected pattern, older worker are less prepared than some younger workers. For example, 47.2 percent of Early Baby Boomers may not ha...

By Robert Stowe England July 22, 2010 "Like the Saturday Night Live lunch counter from the late 1970s that, regardless of what the customers reasonably requested, offered only cheeseburgers, chips, and Pepsi, the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act (the Mortgage Reform Act) would essentially mandate that all flavors of mortgage loans besides 'plain vanilla' may disappear from the menu," write Krstie D. Kully and Laurence E. Platt at K&L Gates LLP law firm. Their assessment appears in a newsletter released by the law firm July 8, that can be read at this link: http://www.klgates.com/newsstand/Detail.aspx?publication=6528 This section of massive Frank-Dodd financial services bill targets originators of mortgages that are not plain vanilla. These companies and institutions are targeted for "punishment through enhanced monetary damages, defense to foreclosure and risk retention requirements," Kully and Platt state. "Only time will tell whethe...

Speaking on CNBC, Las Vegas hotel owner Steve Wynn excoriates the lack of common sense in Washington and blast politicans for insane spending, regulatory policies and legislative initiatives. He says Washington has created a terrible environment of uncertainty for business in America -- worse than in China, which is more stable. "The shocking unexpected government is in Washington," he says. "Everything is cuckoo and God knows what's coming next." In particular, he attacks FHA for backing $20 billion a month in subprime lending. He blasts Obamacare and says it will drive up costs and faults Washington for failing to do anything about frivolous lawsuits that drive up the cost of liability insurance for doctors.

By Robert Stowe England June 14, 2010 Subprime loan performance of mortgages held in private label residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) has finally improved for the first time after rising steadily for nearly four years. Delinquencies in RMBS vintages from 2005 to 2008, which peaked at 54.4 percent in January 2010, began to decline over the last three months and fell to 51.5 percent as of April 2010, according to Moody's Investors Service. "Subprime mortgage loan performance appears to have turned a corner over the past several months," writes Peter McNally, vice president and senior analyst at Moody's in the credit rating agency's Weekly Credit Outlook for June 14. McNally notes that other classes of RMBS, jumbo prime and Alt-A and home equity, have also shown improvement, "though somewhat less pronounced." McNally is crediting the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) as "one contributor" to the improved loan performance for s...

At the request of Senator Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican and ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Budget Office has completed a report titled The Budgetary Impact and Subsidy Costs of the Federal Reserve's Actions During the Financial Crisis. See the report at this link: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/115xx/doc11524/05-24-FederalReserve.pdf The report, written by Kim Kowalewski and Wendy Kiska of CBO's Macroeconomic Anlaysis Division, comes up with what most willl surely think is a low ball estimate of the subsidy cost of the extraordinary actions during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. From July 2007 to the end of 2008, the Fed's balance sheet grew from $790 billion to $2.275 trillion. Of that total, loans and other types of support extended to financial institution made up $1.686 trillion. By the end of 2009, direct loans and other support had fallen to $280 billion, but the Fed held just over $1 trillion in mortgage-related securities...

This 54 minute video was posted May 13 and by early May 18, it had 265,973 hits on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb1n1X0Oqdw&feature=player_embedded The video, which features the views of Gerald Celente of Trends Research Institute, warns of a coming era of hyperinflation and the collapse of the dollar if nothing is done to turn around America and return the economy to free market principles and the government to Constitutional principles. Celente predicted the market crash of 2008. Among other things, the video warns about the likelihood of a Comex default on silver based on the possibility that many commodity traders, like J.P. Morgan Chase, are manipulating silver and selling more silver than actually exists presumably in an effort to drive down the price. A Comex default would drive up precious metals prices dramatically. The video also catalogues dramatic increases in food prices already under way. Gerald Celente warns of food riots and tax riots as pri...

Market observers have been quick to agree that Europe can not print its way out of its crisis, in spite of the $1 trillion emergency rescue package announced Monday. The best quote expressing this view comes Jim Rickards, senior managing director for market intelligence at Omnis, Inc., a scientific consulting firm in McLean, Virginia, from his appearance on CNBC. Rickards quote, from the CNBC video above from Monday, May 10 during early morning show Squawk on the Street at 7:23 AM, is as follows: "Look at what Soros did to the Bank of England in 1992. He went after them, they had a finite amount of dollars. He was selling sterling and taking the dollars, and they were buying the sterling and selling the dollars to defend the peg," Ricards said. "All he had to do was sell more than they had and he wins. But he needed real money to do that. You either had to have cash, which he did, or bank lines of credit." "Today, you can break a country. You don't need mon...

With the price of the bailout rising and momentum for reform in Washington slowing, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain vital to the functioning of the mortgage and housing markets. A framework for a new system is beginning to take shape, at the same time that analysts are looking to fully and adequately address flaws in the current system. Mortgage Banking May 2010 By Robert Stowe England A giant question mark hangs over the mortgage finance industry. What is the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? That is part of a larger question. What is the future of mortgage finance? The two pillars of the mortgage industry that own or guarantee payment on $5 trillion in U.S. mortgages and/or mortgage-backed securities (MBS) failed dramatically at the height of the Panic of 2008 and were placed into conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). The significance of the failure of the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) has been difficult to fully capture; but however you de...

This video clip from CNBC's early morning Squawk Box show features James Chanos, President of Kynikos Associates and Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management LP. The two were interviewed April 27, 2010. Quote from Chanos: “Until we find out what happened (with AIG and Lehman), we’re not going to be able to reform the system."

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), fresh from its grilling yesterday of executives from the credit rating agencies, has released several emails from Goldman Sachs on a Saturday, no less. Cannon fodder for the Wall Street firing squads on the Sunday talk shows, perhaps? There is no "smoking email," as it were, but a lot of grist for the mills in the Obama Administration, Congress and their cheerleaders in the media to vilify Wall Street, with Goldman Sachs as the preferred target of the moment. A July 25, 2007 email from chief financial officer David Viniar is already burning up the wires from the Associated Press in an article by Dan Strumpf titled "E-mails show Goldman boasting as meltdown unfolds." See AP story here: http://apnews.myway.com//article/20100424/D9F9GVN80.html The mortgage-backed securities and mortgage collateralized debt obligation (CDO) markets were beginning to seriously tank in late Jul...

In a new brief released today, Peter J. Wallison at the American Enterprise Institute states that the Obama Administration's financial regulation plan -- as represented in Senator Christopher Dodd's bill -- 'raises the question of whether its purpose is actually to address the causes of the financial crisis or -- like ObamaCare -- to put the government in control of yet another sector of the U.S. economy." Wallison, who is the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at AEI, argues that the bill's provisions allowing for the Federal Reserve to regulate all large, nonbank financial institutions "would signal to the market that these institutions are too big to fail." The proposed $50 billion rescue fund to be administered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) enhances the too-big-to fail approach by assuring creditors "that they will be bailed out if one or more of these large institutions are in danger of failing," the br...

A year ago, a paper written by a student at Harvard College -- Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart -- received a fair amount of media attention. The paper examines the collateral performance and credit rating of asset-backed security collateralized debt obligations, so-called ABS CDOs. The author's findings are not surprising, in light of what is already known about the mortgage meltdown, but they do provide a better delineation of the parameters of the CDO meltdown. Given the intense interest in CDO deals following the Securities and Exchange Commission's charges of civil fraud against Goldman Sachs for a deal known as Abacus 2007 AC1, it is worth revisiting the findings in this research and analysis by a college senior seeking to graduate with honors. The author looks at both broad data on CDO performance and the ratings of credit rating agencies, but she also closely examines 735 ABS CDO deals. The author's main finding is that there was far too much in the way of low qual...

How did Big Finance grow so powerful that its hijinks nearly brought down the global economy – and what hope is there for real reform with Washington politicians on Wall Street's payroll? Bill Moyers talks with authors Simon Johnson and James Kwak, two of the nation's most respected economic experts and authors of the new book 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown . To hear the segment, that ran Friday, April 16, click this link: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04162010/watch.html

Buried in a financial supplement report to the first quarter 2010 SEC filing by J P Morgan Chase is a note that reports that J. P. Morgan chase was paid 5 basis points to borrow $271 billion in repos, which were part of the liquidity provided by the Fed to primary dealers (Wall Street firms) to strengthen financial markets. A post by Edward Harrison on the blog Naked Capitalism argues that, in effect, the government (Federal Reserve) paid J P Morgan Chase to borrow money. Here is how he defends that charge against those who said that technically, the borrowing was not between J P Morgan Chase and the Fed, but between J P. Morgan Chase and its counterparties: A commenter felt my reference to borrowing from the government was misleading. So, note that technically Repo counterparties are largely banks lending and borrowing excess reserves from one another. So, they are not really borrowing from the government. However, the Fed has set the Fed Funds rate at 0.00-0.25%. It controls the Fed ...

This year was supposed to be the final blow to the housing market. A wave of resets of Option ARMs, Interest Only (IOs) mortgages and plain-old adjustable-rate (ARM) mortgages were supposed to lead to a surge in foreclosures, pushing down the weak housing sector as it was showing some signs of stability. New data, however, suggest that is unlikely to happen. For one thing, people been refinancing and modifying their home loans ahead of the resets to avoid rising mortgage payments at the time of the reset. Further, many mortgages on homes that were supposed to reset this year have already gone into foreclosure. Due to these trends, the number of outstanding Option ARMs -- the mortgage that allows for negative amortization -- have fallen from a peak of 1.05 million active loans in March 2006 to 580,000 loans outstanding at the end of 2009, according to First American CoreLogic. So, maybe the reset threat has been cut down to size. Vincent Fernando at The Business Insider makes the case a...

The annual Retirement Confidence Survey released today finds that while the state of American confidence about retirement is stabilizing, more ground has been lost in prepration for retirement since the survey from 2009. The survey is jointly sponsored by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) and Mathew Greenwald and Associates, a market research firm. An EBRI Issue Brief contains lots of details on the findings of the survey. It is authored by Ruth Helman at Greenwald and Craig Copeland and Jack VanDerhei at EBRI and can be dowloaded as a pdf at this link: http://www.ebri.org/pdf/briefspdf/EBRI_IB_03-2010_No340_RCS.pdf Below are the highlights from a press release: The Retirement Confidence Survey (RCS) also finds that a growing number of American workers are also planning to delay retirement—which has negative implications for the U.S. job market, where unemployment is high and layoffs continue to grow. As older workers stay at their jobs longer, the RCS results suggest that...

Will home sales fall off a cliff once the latest version of the homebuyer tax credit expires? Experts vary on the precise impact of the credit, and on what will happen when it ends. But most agree the credit created a big wave of sales pulled forward in time to when the housing market really needed a boost. Mortgage Banking March 2010 By Robert Stowe England The homebuyer tax credit--all three versions adopted since its first effective date of April 1, 2008--is widely believed to have boosted overall home sales at a time when the housing market was in a deep slump. At this point, opinions vary on the extent of the boost, while early data support the view that the credit has had a positive impact. But the big question that remains, is how much of future sales were pulled forward in time, leaving the period after the credits expire badly starved for demand. "Tax credits like this are designed to essentially pull demand forward," explains Jay Brinkmann, chief economist with the ...

CPA Chris Wachtel at Seeking Alpha provides a helpful catalogue of the combination of fears and hopes that are driving the dollar higher. Importantly, he notes, the dollar's strength results form its 'relative' stronger position among a host of weak currencies, including the dollar. Wachtel is the chief analyst for AVAFX, a leading online trading site for global currency, commodity, and stock index trading, at http://www.avafx.com/ Here's a key quote from his Seeking Alpha post: The ramifications are chilling. The default of any of the PIIGS could well send borrowing rates for the others beyond affordable rates, effectively setting off a wave of defaults. Remember that the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank alone was enough to crash credit and asset markets in the fall of 2008. Imagine the panic caused by the collapse of Southern Europe. That alone is enough to explain US dollar strength. Read more at this link: http://seekingalpha.com/article/191052-how-to-profit-from-th...

Peter J. Wallison of the American Enteprise Institute has outlined several alternative futures for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, from nationalization to privatization. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is that they will return as Government-Sponsored Enteprises and sow the seeds for yet another bailout in the future. Only privatization can stop the dead GSEs from returning as zombies. By Robert Stowe England February 18, 2010 In the current issue of Financial Services Outlook , Peter J. Wallison of the American Enteprise Institute lays out alternative future scenarios for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which are currently under the conservatorship of the federal government. The January-February 2010 issue of Financial Services Outlook , devoted entirely to Wallison's article, can be found at this link: http://www.aei.org/docLib/01JanFSOg.pdf Wallison assesses the probability of each scenario and the likely outcome if that scenario is realized. Nationalization The first scen...

Neil Barofsky, in his 224-page quarterly report to Congress as the Special Inspector General for TARP, argues that the extraordinary efforts taken to rescue banks in the 2008 financial meltdown, have inadvertently created a situation where a future crisis will be even worse. Read the entire report, released January 30, 2010, at this link: http://www.sigtarp.gov/reports/congress/2010/January2010_Quarterly_Report_to_Congress.pdf Read FoxNews.com story on the report at this link: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/31/watchdog-bailouts-created-risk/ Below is a section of the Executive Summary that is particularly insightful: It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date. • To the extent that huge, interconnected, “too big to fail” institutions contributed to the crisis, those institutions are now even larger, in part because of the substantial subsidies provided by TARP and other bailout programs. • To the extent that institutions were...

AIG in a filing with the Securities and Exchage Commission has finally released a detailed list of the derivatives contracts covered by bailout funds provided in the fall of 2008 to AIG by the federal governement. The payouts went through AIG to holders of credift default swaps against underlying Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) worth $62 billion. By Robert Stowe England January 30, 2010 American International Group, Inc. (AIG) released Friday a schedule of Collaterized Debt Obligation (CDO's) that were made public two days earlier by a release of the same information by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). The list includes all the derivatives contracts in a federal bailout of AIG to make whole $62 billion in CDOs at big Wall Street firms and large banks around the globe who had purchased Credit Default Swaps from AIG as insurance against the CDO's. Many of the CDO's were loaded with mortgage-backed securities written on pools of mostly subprime loans. Under an agreement broker...

In a story titled "Paperwork Woes Plague Mortgage Plan," in the weekend (January 16-17, 2010) edition of the Wall Street Journal, the accompanying chart appears. It is based on data provided by the Treasury Department. The chart is intended to capture the extent to which banks have move to modify loans that are eligible for loan modifications under the Obama Administration's loan modification program, which subsidizes lower interest rates on existing loans eligible for the program. From a quick look at the chart, it would appear that the lenders with the fewest number of loans eligible for the program have made the most permanent modifications. Permanent modifications occur after a trial period when homeowners who qualify for the program make regular payments on time for their new modified loans. For example, GMAC Mortgage has the highest rate of permanent modifications on the fewest number of eligible loans. Bank of America has one of the lower rates of permanent modific...

News anchor Erin Burnett's throw-away line that the Fed had purchased 80% of new Treasuries goes unchallenged in this discussion on January 8. I'm not sure on what basis that claim is made. Can anyone explain? The Fed's target for Treasury purchases was $200 billion. Treasury issues are far, far higher than that.

In emails from the New York Fed obtained by California Republican Darrell Issa's office, the New York Fed told AIG not to disclose the payments AIG was making to counterparties when the Fed was bailing out AIG. By Robert Stowe England January 7, 2010 Officials from the New York Fed in emails in December 2008 pressured AIG not to disclose how much was paid to counterparties in the federal government bailout of AIG earlier that year. Normally, such information would be disclosed in an 8-K filing by AIG. The emails were obtain by Representative Darrell Issa, California Republican, and released to the press yesterday. Under a bailout deal overseen by then New York Fed Chairman Timothy Geithner, the government agreed to provide 100 cents on the dollar for credit default swaps that were worth considerably less. Through the bailout, full payment on the notional value of the credit default swaps were made by AIG to Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale and other counterparties. The actual emails...