Investors remain cautious, but AIG is once again on the acquisition trail after it once needed a $185 billion bailout by the state.
The insurer has been under sustained pressure for most of the past 15 years. It lurched from Eliot Spitzer’s accounting investigation that resulted in a $1.6bn settlement in 2006 to needing a $185bn government rescue two years later just to survive at the height of the financial crisis.
It has repaid the taxpayer bailout, partly via asset sales. At its peak, the insurer was worth $240bn and had a triple A credit rating. It is now worth about a fifth of that and Fitch rates it A-, six notches lower. Activist investors Carl Icahn and John Paulson agitated for a wholesale break-up of the group as recently as 2016.
Financial Times