Darrell Issa Is In Possession Of AIG's Redacted Schedule A, Wants To Make List Public

Darrell Issa Is In Possession Of AIG's Redacted Schedule A, Wants To Make List Public

Submitted by Tyler Durden , zerohedge.com, 01/27/2010

It appears America's taxpayers are finally about to find out just what worthless securities they received in exchange for 100 cents on the dollar, courtesy of Goldman, Soc Gen, ML et al. when Bernanke and Gaithner, or whoever, decided to pay the banks in full for multi-billion dollar portfolio. As a reminder, the list in question is the now infamous Schedule A, which was redacted across the board, and which the SEC gave its blessing for secret treatment well into 2018.

Shahien Nasiripour of the Huffington Post writes:

UPDATE: 12:40 p.m. - Rep. Issa Still Pushing For AIG Disclosures

Obama administration scourge Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) announced Wednesday that congressional investigators have in their possession one of the most sought documents in the New York Fed-AIG saga: A detailed list of the souring assets taxpayers purchased from the world's biggest banks for 100 cents on the dollar.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York initially pressured AIG to keep the list hidden from investors, regulators and the public. When it was eventually filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC allowed the Fed and AIG to keep the details secret. A heavily-redacted version was made public last March.

Now Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wants to make the whole thing public.

The document is part of 250,000 pages of internal documents on the AIG deliberations subpoenaed by the oversight committee.

It lists the toxic mortgage bonds that Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and other banks insured through AIG. Those insurance contracts, called credit default swaps, are what the New York Fed ultimately took off AIG's books, paying the banks 100 cents on the dollar for souring mortgage bonds -- home mortgages that were bundled together and securitized. The banks could never have gotten anywhere near such a generous deal on the open market, so the move served essentially as a direct subsidy to those banks from taxpayers.

But taxpayers still don't know exactly what they own. The public knows that it owns a certain amount of assets, but none of the details. Taxpayers don't know which bundles of mortgages it purchased from AIG; how the banks were valuing those mortgages; how much collateral they had demanded from AIG on those securities; or which bank bundled those mortgages into securities.

In short, if Issa is successful in getting the document entered into the public record taxpayers will finally know just how much they overpaid.