The Consumerist blog picked up on something that immediately came to my mind upon news of the Fed’s $85 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG – that AIG’s recently-aired ads are suddenly hilarious.
When news of AIG’s pending collapse hit earlier this week, I immediately thought about those commercials with the annoyingly precocious children hailing the rock-solid status of the insurer. Merrill Lynch’s old ad slogan “Bullish on America” also became a punchline after Bank of America purchased it on Monday.
Yesterday, CME Group took steps to to protect market functionality by issuing an order to reduce AIG’s positions in CME products, permitting the limited execution of block trades by AIG in certain CME and CBOT commodity futures products. In other financial sector collapse news, Barclays announced today that it would acquire now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers’ North American investment banking and capital markets business for $1.75 billion. In a statement on the Barclays-Lehman deal, CFTC Acting Chairman Walt Lukken said, “We are facilitating all efforts that promote the orderly unwinding and transfer of positions and uphold the safeguarding of customer assets.”
