Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner defended the 2008 bailout of American International Group Inc for a second day on Wednesday, struggling at times to respond to increasingly contentious questions about the government's efforts to rescue the insurance company as it stood minutes from bankruptcy. The questions came in the second week of trial in a lawsuit brought by Hank Greenberg, a major AIG shareholder until the bailout and the company's chief executive until 2005. He contends the terms of the government $85 billion loan to AIG in September 2008, which was extended in exchange for a nearly 80 percent stake in the company, cheated its shareholders. A U.S. Justice Department lawyer on Wednesday afternoon elicited testimony from Geithner that the New York Fed did not determine until the last minute that it had the authority to provide AIG a loan that could be fully secured. We were "trying to do something we didn't normally do," he said. Geithner described how he
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