Been There.(The Talk of the Town)

If there is a typical way to look after you lose two billion seven hundred million dollars in the stock market, that's pretty much the expression on Hank Greenberg's face these days. Greenberg served for thirty-seven years as the chief executive of American International Group, which he turned into one of the biggest insurance companies in the world. Three years ago, he was forced out, amid accusations of fraud at the company, by the New York Attorney General at the time, Eliot Spitzer. Then, last month, as the financial crisis accelerated, Greenberg, still A.I.G.'s biggest individual shareholder, watched helplessly as the company had to be bailed out by the federal government. Thus, his ten-figure hit.

And that expression? Mostly wistful, with an unmistakable undercurrent of rage and a tiny bit of amusement at the scale of the disaster that befell his company after he was forced out. "It's not a very pleasant feeling," he said the other day, with a quarter smile. Compact and fit at eighty-three--he still plays tennis and skis--Greenberg, in a well-tailored white shirt bearing the monogram "M.R.G.," for the seldom used "Maurice R.," sat bolt upright. He looked only a few pounds over his weight in the Second World War, when, as an infantryman, he stormed the beaches in the Normandy invasion and, later, was among those who liberated the concentration camp at Dachau. Though banished from A.I.G., Greenberg still rates a corner office on Park Avenue, where he presides over C. V. Starr & Company, a separate insurance concern that controls a substantial amount of A.I.G. stock. (Cornelius Vander Starr, whose bronze bust looms near the elevators, created, in 1919, a series of companies that became A.I.G.)

"I don't want to go back and run the company--been there, done that," Greenberg said of A.I.G., but he remains intimately involved as a bereaved shareholder. His personal stake in the company now stands at about a hundred million dollars. Last week, he was lobbying both the company and the federal government to change the terms of the bailout. A.I.G., basically, had to go begging for cash because of the collapse of its London-based financial-products division, whose large credit-default-swap business prompted losses far in excess of the unit's relatively small part of the over-all company. "A.I.G. had a liquidity problem, not a solvency problem," Greenberg said. "The insurance business is quite good. It's ...