April 26 (IFR/Reuters) – Barclays and Deutsche Bank on Thursday won a fierce bidding war for a portfolio of toxic assets the US government acquired in the 2008 bailout of insurance giant AIG.
The Federal Reserve announced it had selected the two banks to buy two vast collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), consisting of bundles of commercial mortgage bonds, which have a face value of $7.5 billion.
The CDOs helped bring down AIG, which needed a massive federal bailout, and were not long ago seen as the kind of toxic re-packaged real-estate assets that spurred the financial crisis.
But with interest rates at current lows, even the worst of the mortgage bonds underlying the CDOs are now much more attractive investments — just one reason that nearly every major Wall Street bank entered the auction.
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