NEW YORK (Reuters) – Such firms as Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley were among the financial institutions that received payouts from American International Group Inc since the Federal Reserve first began to aid AIG, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Citing a confidential document and people familiar with the matter, the Journal said AIG paid at least two dozen U.S. and foreign financial institutions about $50 billion.

Goldman received about $6 billion, as did Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG ….

From Reuters, March 6, 2009

Comment:

It’s commentators who drive the important stories now. That includes, yes, people like yours truly (no room for humility here).

Example:

Back in 2005 and 2006, when I was I reading through comments on trader forums, I realized they had a better sense of how things were manipulated than the big name financial press.  I read Lisa Endlich’s book about Goldman Sachs, which is a rather drab book as far as real insider information goes, but it does tell you the main plot. And that stinks.  GS’s been pulling strings and rigging things in its favor for decades.  They have a history of really dreadful corruption.  I wrote several pieces for the alternative press and one for a financial magazine on Goldman. But no one took up the theme…

Based on what I’d figured out about who the players were and what they were looking for (a power grab), I called a double-top of the market in March 2007 and I warned of  imminent trouble in a piece on Malcolm Gladwell in April 2007.  Gladwell’s article (see my piece, “Bunk: The Art of Writing without Thinking”) seemed like he was testing the wind for something big. The crash came soon after.  There was a small crack (Northern Rock) three months later,  and then a  full-scale avalanche  six months later….

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets (Wiley, August 2007) came out exactly in time and correctly described the history and mechanism of the crash.

Not too shabby for an ex-school-teacher, sometime pianist, and amateur trader typing with three fingers (not to slight my esteemed co-author in any way; he was, obviously, the star of the production)…

Forgive my childish glee at being right about something so horrible.  (I lost money over it too and stand to lose even more).  I guess it’s like a pathologist who finds a particularly horrible type of bacillus. He ought to be upset. But if he’s any kind of pathologist, he probably feels a kind of triumph….almost an aesthetic joy…

It may be a hideous germ, but it’s his germ…he caught it.

He added a piece to the puzzle.

Whoever said human beings were completely rational creatures?