"Thanks for the $132 billion, U.S. Taxpayer. And don't worry about payback -- we're good for it!"
That's the gist of yesterday's congressional testimony from near-dead insurer AIG
From where I sit, it doesn't look promising.
Show us the money, AIG!
As you can see, AIG's planned divestitures of assorted assets (including the $35.5 billion sale to Prudential
I have to say: I have my doubts. Sure, CEO Robert Benmosche says his company will earn as much as $8 billion next year. But the last time AIG was in the profit-making business, it took the company nearly five full years to earn $50 billion, plus -- and it promptly lost twice that amount in the two succeeding years. Call me a skeptic, but a record like that doesn't inspire confidence.
The more so because once AIG has sold off AIA and Alico, how exactly does it plan to earn profits in the first place? The problem with selling assets, you see, is that once you've sold 'em, they stop … earning … profits. So it seems to me, AIG is caught in a Catch-22. It can sell the assets to raise some cash. It can keep the assets and use them to earn more cash. But it cannot do both.
At least, that's the way I see it. But what do you think? Take the Foolish Rorschach test and use the comments box below to tell us what you see in the chart up above.