AIG Employee Finds $500 Billion In Bailout Money Behind Desk

“We knew it was around here somewhere,” AIG New York office manager Rachel Buttowitz told a hastily assembled New York news conference, after a temp worker discovered $500 billion in small bills in several briefcases stuck behind a desk in a lightly used office.

“We’re relieved, of course,” Buttowitz told reporters. “You know how it is when you’ve lost something important and then you find it.”

Buttowitz said that the $500 billion was TARP money recently delivered from the U.S. Treasury to aid in the bank’s bailout.

“I think that one of our people was on the way to the bank with the money when he got a phone call from a client,” Buttowitz explained, “and she got distracted with a client’s business, and she just left the briefcases here. And then the cleaning staff must have just stuck them behind the desks during our recent remodel.”

Buttowitz said that AIG was now conducting an “office-by-office sweep” to make sure that there weren’t any other suitcases full of billions of dollars in TARP money somewhere else.

The temp was given a $50 reward for finding the $500 billion, Buttowitz said.