On Friday, February 11, 2005, shares of American International Group closed at $73.12 per share.
Last Friday, after Eliot Spitzer and the meltdown in the subprime mortgage markets, AIG’s shares closed at $39.34 per share.
James Freeman of the Wall $treet Journal, one of the only mainstream media outlets to expose Spitzer’s extortion of AIG for what it truly was, reports here on the massive reduction of wealth to which Spitzer’s unbridled regulation of AIG contributed greatly. Larry Ribstein, who was one of the first bloggers to shed light on this injustice, surveys the economic carnage here.
My question: Where is the rest of the mainstream media in reporting on this enormous destruction of wealth to AIG shareholders?
while I agree that Spitzer went overboard, we simply don’t – and can’t – know how much of the stock drop, if any, was attributable to Spitzer and how much was attributable to other factors.