How Much Is AIG Really Worth?

AIG, still on the hook to pay back the government $173 billion, is attracting interest for its asset-management units, lining up a half-dozen potential buyers, the Wall Street Journal reports today, leading off its coverage. That's the good news. The bad news is "the sale of the $100 billion portfolio has become complicated by client withdrawals and declines in asset prices," which value the units potentially hundreds of millions of dollars below what AIG had hoped to get for them, the newspaper adds. The aim is to sell off the units by May, the newspaper adds, but the stricken insurer could pull out of the auctions altogether if it believes the bids are too low.

Speaking of shaky deals, the business and tech press today is left to wonder what lies ahead for Sun Microsystems. Shares in Sun fell 23 percent yesterday after it emerged that takeover talks with IBM had fallen apart over the weekend, "raising new questions about the prospects for Sun and its chief executive," the WSJ writes. If the talks cannot be revived—and there are lingering doubts IBM and Sun will ever get back to the negotiating table—CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Sun must find an alternative plan if the Silicon Valley icon is to survive. Already there are doubts. Speculation is high that Schwartz, who backed a merger with IBM, could be out the door. "In response, Sun issued a brief statement Monday affirming confidence in its current leadership and business strategy," the San Jose Mercury News writes. And what about Big Blue? The breakdown will have little effect on IBM's business, Dow Jones news wire writes. According to the news wire, the failed merger "won't significantly set back International Business Machines Corp.'s position in its hardware, software or services markets, though a deal would have given it useful technologies."

If you think the U.S. auto industry's best days are behind it, cheer up, it cannot be as bad as the Russian car-manufacturing sector. The New York Times heads to Tolyatti, Russia, home to a factory that produces the Lada, "the typical boxy people’s car of the former Eastern Bloc," to investigate Russia's recent bailout of the auto sector. Despite the fact that the Tolyatti factory may be the industry's least-efficient assembly plant—the average worker here produces eight cars a year compared with 36 cars per worker per year at a comparable General Motors plant—the Russian government agreed to extend a massive multibillion-dollar aid package to keep the operation afloat. Why fund such a dog? "The auto bailout, Russian style, is intended more to ensure peace in the streets than restructure a business, much to the lament of some critics who think tough love might be better," the newspaper writes. Meanwhile, the European Union will be throwing a lifeline to the U.K. auto industry, the BBC reports. The EU's lending arm, the European Investment Bank, is expected to approve nearly $1 billion in funding to keep Jaguar Land Rover and Nissan factories in Britain from closing.

Back stateside now, short-sellers look set to get short shrift from the SEC (it's a tongue-twister type of morning) as U.S. securities regulators say they will consider about four proposals to restrict a predatory trading practice that has come under heavy criticism recently, CNNMoney.com reports. Critics of short-selling say that traders are breaching securities law by betting against stocks as they depress prices further by selling millions of shares they don't actually possess. That causes so-called delivery failures whereby large chunks of shares aren't properly delivered to investors, explains the WSJ. Now, with the stock market showing signs of recovering, regulators will consider protecting that growth by reinstating the "uptick rule," which "requires short sellers to wait for a rise, or uptick, in a stock's price before placing their bet that it would go down," reports the WSJ. The move would likely find favor on Capitol Hill. Six senators, including Democrats Carl Levin and Edward Kaufman and Republican Arlen Specter, recently declared in a letter to SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro: "Abusive short selling has gone unaddressed for too long and simply must end if the SEC is to restore investor confidence in the markets," CNNMoney.com reports.

The Associated Press has declared war on news aggregators—notably, Google—the Los Angeles Times reports this morning (along with some 237 other news outlets according to, ahem, Google News). At its annual meeting in San Diego, AP Chairman Dean Singleton said the news syndicate was intent on protecting online versions of its news content from "misappropriation" by a variety of online news outlets and that it would look to "legal and legislative remedies" against online publishers that it believes are unfairly using its content. The contentious issue of how news organizations should be rewarded for their content that is re-appropriated in some form on other Web sites has been debated and fought over for some time but has taken on renewed urgency given the dire financial situation of many newspapers. The new hard-line approach was adopted by the AP board, composed mostly of newspaper industry executives, the New York Times reports.

Alleged fraudster Allen Stanford broke his silence yesterday, the Guardian reports, telling an ABC News interviewer "[H]e will 'die and go to hell' if his business empire is a Ponzi scheme." And what about the SEC charges that he was running a vast $8 billion investment scam? "Baloney, baloney, baloney," he told the interviewer. "It's not a Ponzi scheme. If it's a Ponzi scheme, why are they finding billions and billions of dollars all over the place?" Still, Stanford says he expects to be indicted in the next two weeks.