Things that make me go hmm… What were they thinking?

From the New York Times we have this article that A.I.G. waived its right to sue the banks whose sh***y mortgages A.I.G was insuring as part of the bailout. Hey, why isn’t Senator Levin complaining about this deal?

Unknown outside of a few Wall Street legal departments, the A.I.G. waiver was released last month by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform amid 250,000 pages of largely undisclosed documents. The documents, reviewed by The New York Times, provide the most comprehensive public record of how the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Treasury Department orchestrated one of the biggest corporate bailouts in history.

The documents also indicate that regulators ignored recommendations from their own advisers to force the banks to accept losses on their A.I.G. deals and instead paid the banks in full for the contracts. That decision, say critics of the A.I.G. bailout, has cost taxpayers billions of extra dollars in payments to the banks. It also contrasts with the hard line the White House took in 2008 when it forced Chrysler’s lenders to take losses when the government bailed out the auto giant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/business/30aig.html

From the Foreign Policy blog we find out that the Russian spies were not charged with espionage since that offence requires them to be involved in transmitting information related to our national defense. For all practical purposes these “Russian spies” appear to be performing a job we normally attribute to political lobbyists or journalists. I suppose this episode speaks volumes about the Russian psyche that they used a covert operation to engage in political lobbying.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/29/why_weren_t_the_russian_spies_charged_with_espionage