When insurance giant AIG teetered last fall on the brink of collapse, threatening to take with it a lot of Wall Street heavyweights, the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, led by Timothy Geithner, chose to make whole the likes of Goldman Sachs and foreign banks at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. This finding was part of an investigation of the AIG bailout by the inspector general of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, who said Geithner’s office “refused to use its considerable leverage” to negotiate less expensive buyouts of the contracts that banks held with AIG.