Academic

Hank Greenberg took AIG to some impressive heights, Elliot Spitzer then went after him, and what has happened to the company after he was forced to resign must be a little bittersweet - mostly bitter, given that a lot of his net worth is tied up in the company.  Anyway, as others have noted, he's thinking about trying to save the company at the last minute.

Greenberg doesn't think he is getting the help from current management he deserves.  Astute friend-of-the-Glom Miriam Baer pointed us to this anguished cry: "We have been discussing for serveral weeks my offer to assist the company," but "[t]he only concern you have expressed to me is the fear that were I to become an advisor to the company I would 'overshadow' you."  Greenberg says he isn't trying to "point fingers," even though the current management has "nothing under control."  Good stuff.

If he can't help them, it appears that other private entities will not either.  Dealbreaker suggests that the government is toying with putting the insurance firm under a federal conservatorship, and if that happens, Henry Paulson really will be the most powerful man in America, because I can't think of a legal basis he would have for that, other than perhaps a troubling declaration by the president that the emergency powers offered by TWEA and IEEPA might warrant serious peacetime economic involvement.

It is, after all, something we have heard from this administration before.

But I'd bet on that last line of defense, the Fed's discount window, being the statutory basis for government action if government action there is to be.