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So where has all that taxpayer cash that’s been shoveled into AIG gone?  Today they revealed their largest counterparties, and the top 5 — drum roll, please — are:

  • Goldman Sachs: $12.9 billion
  • Bank of America + Merrill Lynch: $12.0 billion
  • Société Générale: $11.9 billion
  • Deutsche Bank: $11.8 billion
  • Barclays: $8.5 billion

So it looks like everyone was right: Goldman did have enormous exposure to AIG and foreign banks did get massive dollops of aid from the bailout.  No wonder Lloyd Blankfein and Christine Lagarde took such a keen personal interest in AIG’s fortunes.

UPDATE: The AIG memo contains four appendices that list amounts paid out to various creditors.  I just added them up to get the numbers above, but Felix Salmon says that amounts to adding up apples and oranges.  The real action, he says, is solely in Appendix 2, which gives us a different top 5:

  • Société Générale: $6.9 billion
  • Goldman Sachs: $5.6 billion
  • Merrill Lynch: $3.1 billion
  • Deutsche Bank: $2.8 billion
  • UBS: $2.5 billion

There’s more to it than this, though.  Read Felix for more details on why further transparency is still needed.

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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