The Big Short_ Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis [36]
Enter Sosin, with his supposedly new and improved interest rate swap model--even though Drexel Burnham was not at the time a market leader in interest rate swaps. There was a natural role for a blue-chip corporation with the highest credit rating to stand in the middle of swaps and long-term options and the other risk-spawning innovations. The traits required of this corporation were that it not be a bank--and thus subject to bank regulation, and the need to reserve capital against risky assets--and that it be willing and able to bury exotic risks on its balance sheet. It needed to be able to insure $100 billion in subprime mortgage loans, for instance, without having to disclose to anyone what it had done. There was no real reason that company had to be AIG; it could have been any triple-A-rated entity with a huge balance sheet. Berkshire Hathaway, for instance, or General Electric. AIG just got there first.
In a financial system that was rapidly generating complicated risks, AIG FP became a huge swallower of those risks. In the early days it must have seemed as if it was being paid to insure events extremely unlikely to occur, as it was. Its success bred imitators: Zurich Re FP, Swiss Re FP, Credit Suisse FP, Gen Re FP. ("Re" stands for Reinsurance.) All of these places were central to what happened in the last two decades; without them, the new risks being created would have had no place to hide and would have remained in full view of bank regulators. All of these places, when the crisis came, would be washed away by the general nausea felt in the presence of complicated financial risks, but there was a moment when their existence seemed cartographically necessary to the financial world. AIG FP was the model for them all.
The division's first fifteen years were consistently, amazingly profitable--there wasn't the first hint that it might be running risks that would cause it to lose money, much less cripple its giant parent. In 1993, when Howard Sosin left, he took with him nearly $200 million, his share of what appeared to be a fantastic money machine. In 1998, AIG FP entered the new market for corporate credit default swaps: It sold insurance to banks against the risk of defaults by huge numbers of investment-grade public corporations. The credit default swap had just been invented by bankers at J.P. Morgan, who then went looking for a triple-A-rated company willing to sell them--and found AIG FP.* The market began innocently enough, by Wall Street standards.
Large numbers of investment-grade companies in different countries and different industries were indeed unlikely to default on their debt at the same time. The credit default swaps sold by AIG FP that insured pools of such loans proved to be a good business. By 2001, AIG FP, now being run by a fellow named Joe Cassano, could be counted on to generate $300 million a year, or 15 percent of AIG's profits.
But then, in the early 2000s, the financial markets performed this fantastic bait and switch, in two stages. Stage One was to apply a formula that had been dreamed up to cope with corporate credit risk to consumer credit risk. The banks that used AIG FP to insure piles of loans to IBM and GE now came to it to insure much messier piles, which included credit card debt, student loans, auto loans, prime mortgages, aircraft leases, and just about anything else that generated a cash flow. As there were many different sorts of loans, to different