Sometimes there seems to be no more than six degrees of separation between the Clintons and any financial trick pulled over the last few decades.

In the case of American International Group, the separation isn’t even that much.

This week, the trial against AIG’s ex-chairman, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, and its former chief financial officer, Howard I. Smith, kicked off in New York state court.

In 2005, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (who later had problems of his own) filed civil charges alleging that AIG engineered bogus reinsurance transactions in 2000 and 2001 to bolster its reserves against possible losses. If that happened, it would have made AIG look better to Wall Street.

Greenberg and Smith denied the allegations. Greenberg said Spitzer had a grudge against him. And we’ll probably have to wait months to see if the charges will stick.

This is where the Clintons come in.

AIG was pulling that same sort of nonsense in Arkansas in the late ’80s when Bill Clinton was governor.

In fact, AIG couldn’t have done the nonsense it did without the help of something called the Arkansas Development Finance Authority.

The ADFA investment was part of a Gov. Clinton signature project, and the money — $5 million — was invested in a strange little Barbados company called Coral Reinsurance.

AIG and Coral Reinsurance fell under a stiff regulatory gaze some years later. No charges were ever filed.

AIG was improperly treating Coral Re as a separate independent company and not as an affiliate. And doing that allowed AIG to write more insurance, with less reserves to back up the policies.

I stumbled upon AIG and Coral Re when I was investigating the Clintons and Whitewater. I still don’t know what the Clintons — or the state of Arkansas — got out of this. But I can imagine.

But Coral Re seems very much like what will be the situation that will be adjudicated in New York in the coming weeks.

As the song goes, “Everything old is new again.”

Federal Reserve officials are now in their mandatory quiet period in advance of the next policy meeting later this month.

That doesn’t mean they won’t give opinions to friends, relatives and neighbors. It just means they can’t make public statements.

And that’s good because every time one of the Fed officials talks, it seems to affect the stock market, even if the Fed official doing the yapping has very little power on his/her own.

While the Fed wants and needs to raise interest rates, the betting right now is that chair Janet Yellen won’t have the guts to do so — especially after the stock market tanked last Friday and on Tuesday when some lesser Fed officials suggested a rate hike might be a good thing.

Sixty-one percent of Americans say the presidential election is the biggest threat to the economy.

Terrorism is a distant second at 12 percent, according to a poll conducted by Bankrate.com. The struggling overseas economies — the Federal Reserve’s favorite excuse — are cited by only 8 percent and an increase in interest rates is mentioned by 5 percent.

As I’ve been saying, Wall Street had better pay more attention to the election because it’s going to be a doozy that will have wide-ranging ramifications.

So let me say it again: I think Hillary Clinton will be rendered unelectable by the time Nov. 8 arrives. And the Democrats are going to wish they had picked a candidate without so many secrets.

The next big shocker will be when Hillary’s personal, private (and likely very embarrassing) emails are released.

Meanwhile, betting on the election is getting more vigorous.

Predictt is a website that allows people to bet on the candidates, who are treated as if they are shares of a company. Clinton shares fell 6 cents after her 9/11 memorial health scare.

But Donald Trump didn’t gain all the momentum that Hillary lost. His shares only gained 4 cents.

TD Bank says that 44 percent of the millennial generation doesn’t have a credit card.

The bank attributes this to the fact that millennials, people who were in their teens around the turn of the century, came of age during a financial crisis and because they have too much student debt to think about owing credit card debt.

Or maybe millennials can’t get credit cards because the jobs they’ve gotten after school pay too little. My money is on the likelihood that the jobs they have don’t pay enough.

People must be brown-bagging it more often.

NPD Group, which tracks business at restaurants, says food-service lunch has posted consecutively steeper declines over the past six months.

In the quarter ended in June, lunch visits declined by 4 percent compared with the same quarter a year ago.

NPD blamed the rise of employees working at home for part of the drop — while those folks who must still work in an office must be eating leftovers at their desks.

Price hikes and shopping online are also keeping people away from the lunch counter.