American Insurance Group

American Insurance Group: Economic historians and Ph.D. candidates will dig deeply into the annals of this economic crisis. The American Insurance Group (AIG) will be the protagonist of the historical-story line. AIG’s risk tolerance, risk analysis, and policy to insure risk could be the root of this economic turmoil.

Rather than elaborate and interpret, I will  list a series of relevant stories. Click on the titles below to read the report on a separate browser page. 

Corporate malfeasance convolutes and distorts the best qualities of a firm and its people.  Many AIG employee stomachs turned sour when learning of AIG’s failing compleasance. In the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’s “fifth Law of Nature, is compleasance; that is to say, “That every man strive to accommodate himselfe (sic) to the rest.”

Hobbes contrasts the man who will adjust himself, his passions, to the larger group with the “man that by asperity of Nature, will strive to retain those things which to himselfe (sic) are superfluous, and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his Passions, cannot be corrected, is to be left, or cast out of Society, as combersome (sic) thereunto.” AIG Corporation may “be left, or cast out of Society, as combersome thereunto.”

Here are your stories; this is not an exhaustive list. 

• Falling Giant:  A Case Study Of AIG by Gregory Gethard
• Jim Crammer Apologizes to AIG Employees
• AIG Employees on Edge as Once-Safe Company in Turmoil
• AIG On The Brink
• Crisis on Wall Street: Questions and Answers On AIG
• Charlie Rose: A Conversation About AIG with Hank Greenberg

In 1987 the dollar could buy you 154 yen; today a dollar buys you 117 yen. If you traveled to Japan in 1971, you could have a great time with 358 yen for every dollar.

In 1985, James A. Baker as secretary of Treasury Chief listed, “Item one on (the) agenda was the dollar”. This is the subject of the Appendix attached to Baker’s auto-biography, Work Hard, Study…and Keep Out of Politics

The dollar and trade deficits sent U.S. policy makers toward isolation to protect the American worker after World War I. Isolationist policies do not work because we live in a global market.

Baker recalls the steps taken as forty-four nations approved the Bretton Woods Agreement (1944). Bretton Woods established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The dollar was benchmarked to gold prices and other currencies were benchmarked to the dollar.

Baker considers Bretton Woods along with “the Fed’s successful war on inflation” as the fuel that “set the American economy afire.” As with America; so with the world.

James Baker asserts “economic policy coordination” as fundamental for American and international prosperity. After World War II, the United States presumed economic, political, and military supremacy. But the world is changing; some countries do not care what we think or do.

Today, the U.S. is challenged in every category by every nation. Why live the American dream when you can experience the dreams of India, China, or Thailand?

America faces incredible economic challenges. How can we sustain predictable economic power if we do not bring debt under control? Debt payments could become the life-style waster for successive generations.

Well, how does this effect the dollar? One tool countries use for economic management is raising the value of their currency. Currency value is a benefit. Trade balance is the goal.

U.S. economic policy may be in the cross-hairs of low interest rates, low dollar-values, high oil prices (current low-prices are temporary), and large trade-deficits. A decision to control one could be a catalyst for the other.

“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” – Abba Eban

During an interview on Meet the Press (October 18, 1987), James Baker was prompted to say, “We will not sit back in this country and watch surplus countries jack up interest rates and squeeze growth worldwide on the expectation that the United States somehow will follow by raising interest rates.” (Listen to Bloomberg TV, and you might hear this recurrent economic theme.)

Baker writes, “One lesson I learned at Treasury is that even the most innocent remarks about the dollar or other economic issues could provoke investors to buy or sell, almost blindly, in response.” It all adds up to historical redundancy; the crisp dollar is crumpled.