Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will testify Jan. 27 before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the emerging controversy over the decision to make whole a number of foreign and domestic bank counterparties to American International Group's credit default swap transactions.
The hearing will also examine other issues related to the collapse and federal rescue of AIG, Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., chairman of the panel, said Friday in announcing that Secretary Geithner has agreed to appear.
"When average people were losing their homes and their jobs, the Bush Administration decided to use taxpayer dollars to give a backdoor bailout to the biggest players on Wall Street," Towns said. "Now we know that the people who delivered the bailout wanted to keep the details hidden from the public. We need to understand why and how taxpayer dollars were used to bail out the same people who helped cause the financial crisis in the first place."
Besides Geithner, others who have agreed to testify include Thomas Baxter, executive vice president and general counsel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program; and Elias Habayeb, former senior vice president and chief financial officer of AIG Financial Services Division.
Also invited to testify were to Henry Paulson, the former treasury secretary, and Stephen Friedman, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and current member of the Goldman Sachs board.
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