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http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1886275-2,00.html

It’s a decent overview article, if you’re interested in this you probably know most of it, TIME is writing to the lowest common denominator here.

Two paragrapha are worth attention:

“With its high credit rating, AIG FP wasn’t required to stockpile reserves, or collateral, as traditional insurers must to cover potential losses. As the CDOs that AIG insured began to crater, the counterparties began asking for more collateral to back their policies, which was written into the contracts. Cassano said in August 2007 that he couldn’t imagine a situation in which AIG would “lose one dollar in any of these transactions.” He was right. AIG didn’t lose a dollar; it lost billions of them.

In a rare interview, former CEO Greenberg, who is suing AIG and being sued by the company over financial-management issues, tells TIME that once the company lost its top credit rating, AIG FP should have stopped writing swaps and hedged, or reinsured, its existing ones. But Cassano’s unit doubled down after the spring of 2005, writing more and more subprime-linked swaps as the ratings plunged, which made the possible need for collateral enormous in the event its debt was downgraded. The downgrades occurred in 2008. “Of course they were going to run out of money,” says Greenberg. He adds that as the liquidity crunch hit in 2008, AIG FP should have renegotiated terms with the banks to ease their demands on collateral. “You can renegotiate almost anything, anytime.” “