Michael Lewitt '85 (LL.M. '88), president of Harch Capital Management, appeared on the September 17 edition of PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to discuss the government's bailout of the troubled insurance behemoth American International Group (AIG). Lewitt called the bailout the right decision, since AIG's failure would have caused a domino effect among financial institutions. But, Lewitt added, the situation was anything but ideal: "We're all going to pay a price for this. The dollar is going to continue to deteriorate. The U.S. balance sheet is getting trashed. And this is no way to run a railroad, as they say." He expressed his hope for a reevaluation of the current financial system, whose problems, he said, stemmed from "decades of very bad thinking and very bad policies."
Lewitt also weighed in on the current financial crisis in an op-ed in the September 16 New York Times, portraying the potential fall of AIG, which plays a major role in multiple key markets, as worse than that of Lehman Brothers: "Regulators knew that if Lehman went down, the world wouldn’t end. But Wall Street isn’t remotely prepared for the inestimable damage the financial system would suffer if AIG collapsed."
