American International Group Is Working From a More Solid Base

The years since the financial crisis have shown that American International Group would have destroyed substantial value even if it had never written a single credit default swap, had noncore businesses it needed to shed, and had material issues in its core operations that it needed to fix. We've been encouraged, however, by the recent progress in terms of improving underwriting margins, and the plan to take out $1 billion in costs has been another material step. In 2020, the impact of the coronavirus obscured the company's progress, but we think results since have been encouraging.