AIG stock up 97% YTD, HOWEVER: Forgot to Report $18.7 Billion of Company Guarantees

Robert Benmosche (12/29/10):

"I was wondering if I might get a call from someone saying maybe 'you were right,' because we look better than we did last May and we can see the finish line from here, and it comes with a profit for the taxpayers," Mr. Benmosche said in an email. "But as I learned in [Ayn Rand's book] 'Atlas Shrugged,' find your Thank Yous from within." WSJ Unlikely Comeback of AIG's Stock

By Andrew Frye and Hugh Son
Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- American International Group Inc., the bailed-out U.S. insurer, failed to report $18.7 billion of policyholder guarantees at two property-casualty subsidiaries in 2008, a Pennsylvania regulator said.

National Union Fire Insurance Co. of Pittsburgh and American Home Assurance Co., which issued the guarantees to bolster other AIG units, had contingent liabilities tied to the promises of $157 billion on Dec. 31, 2008, compared with the $138.3 billion disclosed at the time, Robert Pratter, the state’s acting insurance commissioner, said today in a report.

AIG was instructed by the regulator to limit or end its intra-group guarantees, according to the report. It doesn’t face financial penalties, Rosanne Placey, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania regulator, said in an e-mail. The New York-based insurer, once the world’s largest, was brought to the brink of collapse in September 2008 when the company was unable to meet its obligations without a cash injection from the government.

Failing to report contingent liabilities may be “a serious problem because of the systemic risk for the whole enterprise,” said Robert Hunter, a former Texas insurance commissioner who is now insurance director at the Washington-based Consumer Federation of America. The rest of the AIG/Absent Minded Professor Bloomberg Story