Economies: another huge sum for AIG - but will it be enough?

The plan was simple - and had a lot in common with the Brown plan for rescuing the UK banking sector: take priority-level shares in the company and get the money back under what would amount to a buy-back plan.

The difference was that in the case of AIG, the money for the buy-back would be found from breaking up the company. They said "selling off assets" but that could mean only one thing: business units had to go.

In Hong Kong two weeks ago, a rumour started that AIG there was in trouble. In fact, it's not - if you look at it in isolation. Hong Kong regulators stepped in and police arrested people, and confiscated computers, used in creating and spreading the rumour. At the time, it seemed heavy handed but within days, as markets around the world fell on panic and unsubstantiated rumour, the Hong Kong measures did not appear as harsh as first thought.

And whilst many of AIG's overseas operations are essentially sound, readers will recall that Lehman Brothers in London had a cash-pile that would have seen it through the next seven or eight months even without any additional work. But it was still dragged down by the failure of its parent and the failure of Lehman's in the US was nothing of the scale of the AIG collapse.

Now the NYFed has put in almost half as much money as was put in a month ago.

The obvious question is "where did the USD85 milliard go in just a month? And if it's all gone, is the latest amount going to mean that the company has just two weeks to survive unless it is further bailed out, or makes a massive sale of some of its property and business unit assets.

With the expected downturn in occupancy, failing businesses as tenants and consequently rents for commercial property, AIG is sitting on depreciating assets in terms of its property portfolio. And its own offices are unlikely to get much demand on a sale-and-leaseback arrangement because few landlords will want to take the risk of buying a large block from a tenant that is planning its own demise, only to be left with a large empty building when tenants are hard to come by.