New York, Oct 07: Following last week’s disclosure that former New York Stock Exchange chairman and CEO Dick Grasso may have influenced the stock trading of American International Group (AIG), Big Board regulators said on Sunday that they will interview the floor specialists who handled the share trading of AIG, Monday’s Wall Street Journal reported. “We will ask the specialists what their impressions were and we will also look at what happened in the marketplace,” said Edward Kwalwasser, the NYSE’s executive vice-president for regulation, in an interview over the weekend. Mr Kwalwasser’s investigators will question AIG traders about whether they felt they were encouraged to buy shares of the insurance behemoth by Mr Grasso because of suggestions by AIG chairman and CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg to commit more capital.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that in recent years, Mr Greenberg, 78, complained a number of times to Mr Grasso that his specialist had at times not purchased enough shares to quell volatile trading on the exchange floor.
Big Board trading is handled by a “specialist”, or auctioneer, who oversees the buying and selling of stock on the NYSE floor, using capital from his or her firm’s own account to create markets when not enough public investors step forward to do so. AIG trading is overseen by Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, a unit of Goldman Sachs Group. Bureau Report