It is a simple enough question: who bought the credit-default swaps that American International Group sold during the housing bubble? And at this point — after Bailout No. 4, with the government handing A.I.G. another $30 billion to go with the previous $150 billion — you would think that the taxpayers would have the right to know that information. Is it Goldman? Royal Bank of Scotland? The Irish banks that are on the verge of collapse? What happened to all that transparency the new administration keeps talking about?

In the wake of my column on Saturday, I received a number of comments here at Executive Suite along the lines of this one:

Joe, I’m trying to find info re: what percentage of these credit-default swaps are “owned” by foreign investors, what percent owned by banks, what percent owned by pension funds. (And if banks are owning them, as your column suggests, which ones?)

Seems to me … it’d be helpful to know as A.I.G. continues to be bailed out where exactly the $$$ is going. I’m assuming much of it (most? all?) is going to cover their CDSs.

Why this is important? To keep the spin machines honest.

Thanks.

This strikes me as a completely legitimate question. After all, the reason A.I.G. is being propped up is that the government fears that if the company defaulted, the counterparties would suddenly be faced with tens of billions of dollars worth of unacknowledged losses — and they would go bust. It would make the Lehman fiasco look like a garden party. As Nouriel Roubini put it on CNBC recently (I’m paraphrasing): It’s not a bailout of A.I.G.; it’s a bailout of the counterparties.

What’s more, a fair amount of what A.I.G. was doing was pretty sleazy behavior, using credit-default swaps to help banks evade regulatory capital requirements. And yet when newspapers like this one have requested the information, they have been ignored or turned down.

The answer, as I understand it, is that A.I.G. views these as “confidential transactions,” and the government (as per usual?) is going along with that rationale. One government official told me that if the federal government divulged the names of the counterparties it would amount to a violation of the Trade Secrets Act — unless the counterparties agreed to it, which they never will.

Pretty unsatisfying, isn’t it? Gobs of tax money is going to bail out unnamed companies — and yet we aren’t allowed to know who they are, and are supposed to take it all on faith. You know those awful cases you read about every once in a while where a child dies in a troubled home — and then the state health department won’t divulge any information out of “privacy concerns”? This strikes me as the financial equivalent of those cases. As excuses go, it sure is convenient.