Andrew Ross Sorkin, journalist , New York Times, and author of Too Big To Fail : Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street quotes the conversation of President Bush and Paulson, the treasury secretary and Ben Bernanke to emphasise over-extension of AIG beyond its core business of insurance into exotic derivative products such as credit default swaps. President Bush asks,’ An insurance company does all this ?’ Well, this one did. If you had asked 99 per cent of the world, ‘ What does AIG do ?’, they would have replied that it is an insurance company. But it was really into so much more. And that was a big part of a problem.