Did the worldwide recession actually start in the UK?
As the dust settles on significant financial troubles with the likes of AIG it has been revealed that up to £310 billion worth of toxic debt may have been racked up in a small Mayfair office in London. As the AIG situation starts to become a little clearer it is believed that a dozen or so members of AIG Financial Products may have been heavily involved in the substantial toxic debt which was taken on board from the company's fifth floor offices at One Curson Street.
If this is confirmed in due course it will be a major embarrassment for the UK authorities who should effectively have been regulating the operations of AIG Financial Products in the UK. Gordon Brown's insistence that the worldwide economic crisis, which many believe was triggered in part by the AIG collapse, was an export of the US could well come under serious doubt. The operations at Curson Street involved highly complicated and highly specialised credit default swaps and other complex financial instruments which effectively allowed banks to pass on the risk that their loan exposure would go "bad".
It was this effective collapse of this financial insurance division which had a knock-on effect to the worldwide banking sector and saw an overnight collapse in money markets. From then on the rest is history.............
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