By that point in time, however, how AIG saw itself and how everyone had come to view it were rapidly diverging. The clients who bought super-seniors insured by AIG might still be making their payments, but on paper they saw their values falling. Market confidence in CDOs had collapsed; the credit-rating agencies were lowering their rankings on tens of billions of dollars’ worth of CDOs, even those that had triple-A ratings. In 2007 one of its biggest clients, Goldman Sachs, demanded that AIG put up billions of dollars more in collateral as required under its swaps contracts.
