Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America Highlight

Early in that summer of 2008, Dinallo would chair a multistate task force charged with helping AIG “wind down” its crippled securities-lending business in such a way that AIG’s subsidiary insurance companies (and by extension the holders of policies issued by those companies) would not be harmed by any potential bankruptcy. The threat that a run on Neuger’s sec-lending business would result in these insurance companies getting bankrupted or seized by state insurance commissioners was like a guillotine that hung over the entire American economy in the summer of 2008—and, in ways that to this day remain unknown to most Americans, that guillotine would become a crucial factor in the decision to bail out AIG