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 So was it Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s (NYSE:GS) and Societe Generale SA's demands to collect on $11.4 billion American International Group Inc. (NYSE:AIG) owed its counterparties on mortgage-linked securities that pushed the insurer into the land of multiple bailouts?According to a report by Bloomberg: Goldman Sachs got $5.9 billion and Societe Generale received $5.5 billion of about $18.5 billion in collateral paid by AIG in the 15 months before the September bailout. The payments helped settle AIG's obligations on $62.1 billion of credit-default swaps that the Federal Reserve later removed from the New York-based insurer as part of the rescue "It was precisely that drain of liquidity to Goldman and SocGen that put AIG in a position of illiquidity and ultimately threw them into the government's arms," said Charles Calomiris , a finance professor at Columbia Business School in New York. But truth be told, Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale were smart enough to recognize that AIG had a big problem. So, while it might seem these two firms were being cut throat by demanding the money, they were, in fact, protecting their client's interests, which is, after all, their real responsibility, not upholding a facade that AIG was healthy. As Clusterstock's Joe Weisenthal writes: Goldman didn't really kill AIG. AIG did. The company's been bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. While Goldman may have had a hand in turning the screws to the company, they obviously aren't the prime factor here. Far from it. And considering the mess that the rest of AIG appears to have been, all we can say is that Goldman's demands may have been the inciting incident, but far from the real story. The real danger was that no one appears to know the full details of how much trouble AIG's CDS book put the company and the economy. What's more, as The Deal's Robert Teitelman pointed out, we still don't know "the nature of the CDS book or about the systemic effect of an AIG failure or bankruptcy." - Maria Woehr Also see: Why did AIG pay its counterparties? AIG's black box and the problem of systemic risk
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