AIG Yanks Our Chain Or Was It The Federales

AIG (AIG) announced the sale of its private banking operation to a wealthy Abu Dhabi group called Aabar. Not unexpected. AIG of course is the motivated seller. The Abu Dhabi group Aabar has the Mike Barris who points out in the article that:

“Aabar Investments, whose shares trade on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, said in October it could spend as much as $2.4 billion on expansion efforts in the next year. Its cash levels swelled after Aabar's board in September approved issuing 6.7 billion U.A.E dirhams ($1.82 billion) of convertible bonds to Abu Dhabi oil-and-gas investment firm International Petroleum Investment Co.”

But maybe everything did not go into this one deal so its hard to guess any further. Given that the Feds sign off on everything you would think they would help financial markets return to sanity by putting out correct information in a timely manner. If the transaction is financially significant that say so and put a number out there. If the transaction is not significant than stop yanking our chain. We have had enough chain yanking.