AIG bailout

It's been an interesting week at work -- or, well, interesting for my client I guess. They do the bulk of their business with AIG insurance and have been fielding calls from panicking clients wanting to know what's going to happen with their insurance.

And left us twiddling our thumbs for a bit, since the new system we wrote is customized specifically for AIG business and would need to be changed/de-linked if AIG disappeared or was downgraded to such a credit risk that they could no longer do business with them. There were some very tense calls ysterday. I don't think we've seen the whole fallout yet, but it was certaining an up-close-and-personal view of how this was happening.

Fun, too, to listen to the politicians trying to make hay on this one. McCain claimed (wrongly) that his committee (the Commerce committee) was in the thick of things and could affect change -- which is 100% wrong, by the way, commerce is specifically excluded from the banking and finance industries) and, even better, that he (McCain) had warned about this coming mortgage crisis and his prescience simply went unheeded. Which is also wrong. Just before the primary, he was talking about how he didn't see this coming and really didn't understand the forces at work. I didn't hear Barack's speech, I'l lhave to go listen to it online, I guess. I do know that he talked about mortgage relief and new bankruptcy laws, but I don't know the details.

It looks like the government is going to bail them out -- o the tune of 85 billion dollars -- in order to keep that sector in finance from collapsing completely. It was not a sure thing -- and may still be in the works -- but here's hoping that it stabilizes things.