Thomas Baxter

  • YPFS: Since AIG is an insurance company, what was the role of the insurance regulators and their interaction with the Fed during this time?
    • Baxter: The insurance commissioners really didn't help the rescue of AIG, but they didn't harm it either.

2018 1120 - Lessons Learned Oral History Project Interview: Thomas Baxter - 19p

2014 1002 - Starr International Company, Inc. v. The United States - Case 1:11-cv-00779-TCW - Trial Volume 4 - Baxter - 249p

  • (p153-154) Q. And you've mentioned that there was a discussion about some of the systemic issues concerning AIG, and I assume what you mean there is if AIG were to go bankrupt. What were some of those systemic issues that were discussed, to your recollection?
  • 1 A. Yeah. The impact on 401(k) plans. The impact on other, other retirement plans that AIG had wrapped, that was another issue that came up. Stable value funds was another. I think I mentioned I remember a particular reference to teachers retirement plans. And the reason that I remember that is my wife is a New York City public school teacher, so I would have a much higher authority  to account for -- account to, rather.
  • 10 Q. Understood.
  • 11 A. And those were the kinds of things I remember. It would have been bad.
  • 2010 0609 - McClatchy - AIG's problems far greater than Bush officials told public, Greg Gordon - [link]
    • A central question is how much U.S. officials knew about the company's problems when they decided to bail it out.
    • Thomas Baxter, the general counsel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, acknowledged in phone interviews that the Fed's understanding of the insurer's financial condition "changed over time as we got to know AIG and its problems."
      • "That led us to come up with different solutions as we learned . . . that its problems were both liquidity (a cash squeeze) and capital (insufficient assets)," he said.
    • Robert Eisenbeis, a former research director for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said that the AIG bailout "was painted as a liquidity problem, and it was a solvency problem. And it's still a solvency issue."