Insuring Insurance is Good Business, Clearly

"Risk controls at the company were clearly inadequate." That's Bill Bergman, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. in Chicago, who also said, "AIG keeps getting hit square between the eyes by the housing-finance meltdown."

Given the new bad news about AIG's weakness, and the new good news therein for certain elements in the market, one might want to press Bill Bergman to pin down more exactly what he understands by "clearly."

For his sentence to be clear and adequate, he must mean: "Fraud enabled AIG to operate with these clearly inadequate risk controls."

Or he means something like, "These risk controls were so inadequate that they have resulted in losses so clearly catastrophic that it's clear we'll do all we can to mitigate them, hastily, without clear policy controls, without clear monitoring -- without, in short, clarity. Some, of course, will profit."



Interestingly, the AIG site sports no AIG logo, and doesn't even pretend to be a company. It's just: "Insurance Website."



The company, or website, or whatever, remains under the stewardship of Edward Liddy.

[update] See Golby.