"Oh Look What I Just Found under the Mattress!"

I've been boycotting Andrew Lee Sorkin's Too Big to Fail for the same reason I avoid Bob Woodward: sounds like so much unsourced insider gossip. I may need to rethink. Yves Smith has been reading Sorkin, zeroing in on the rescue of AIG. Here's Yves:

The Fed agrees to extend a $14 billion loan to get it through the trading day but it wants collateral. Collateral? From a broke company? How is that going to happen?

Then we get this bit:

Wilmustad understandably wondered how they were supposed to come up with $14 billion in the next several minutes. Then it dawned on them: the unofficial vaults. The bankers ran downstairs and found a room with a lock and a cluster of cabinets containing bonds – tens of billions of dollars’ worth, dating mostly from the Greenberg era. They began rifling through the cabinets, picking through fistfuls of securities that they guessed had gone untouched for years. In an electronic age, the idea of keeping bonds on hand was a disconcerting but welcome throwback. (p. 400)

WTF? This is a company about to go out of business, then it suddenly remembers it has a secret stash….worth at least 1/6 of the initial government rescue commitment? $14 billion was only what they coughed up to satisfy the Fed. How much more was left in those cabinets?

And more important, WHO SUPPOSEDLY OWNED THIS PAPER? This wasn’t held by the subsidiaries; otherwise, AIG would not have been able to pledge it to the Fed. And if it was a parent company holding, why wasn’t it repoed or sold earlier? What entity took the semi-annual interest payments? Take the $14 billion we know about, and assume a 5% interest rate. That’s $700 million. Where did it go? Was it reinvested? Disbursed?

Wonderful. But note that it was Yves, and not Sorkin, who connected the dot.