Okay, I have another question that shows how little I truly understand this situation. Remember when the phone companies had to be split up because they constituted a monopoly? They were a lot smaller, and then some of them merged with each other, and then there were more mergers and now there are huge companies again (for example: Illinois Bell -> Ameritech -> SBC -> AT&T). Why was that not done with AIG? Why was AIG allowed to continue to operate as one enormous corporation that was recently deemed "too big to fail", instead of being split out into its component businesses? Will the company be divvied up now, I wonder?

Thanks,
Elyse