I wish I could tell you more about what this meant, but I really don’t understand fully why AIG is different from Lehman and why one is allowed to fail and the other is not and why it was a big deal to rescue Chrysler 1ith 1 billion dollars but nothing to rescue AIG with 85 billion and why they can do it without a peep from Congress.
I guess the real goal in business these days is to get big enough and do enough stupid things that everyone is relying on the bad loans you are holding, and then you are deemed to big to fail. I guess the main question I have is if we keep saying these things are too big to fail, why don’t we break them up?
Also, my gut tells me this is not over. I am betting the market will go up in the short term, and we will roll along blindly and in a few months something else will happen that will trigger a similar crisis, this time with someone else. Not sure when this will end, but it will probably have to start with the housing market bottoming out. At least that is what I think from listening to and reading all the financial folks the last couple of weeks.
This column seems to ask the right questions.