a closer relationship with Wall Street, during the years that Timothy Geithner was president, he became unusually close with the scions of Wall Street banks, a time when banks and hedge funds were pursuing investment strategies that caused the financial crisis of 2007–2008, which the Fed failed to stop. During the crisis, several major banks that were on the verge of collapse were rescued via the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. Geithner engineered the New York Fed's purchase of $30 billion of credit default swaps from American International Group (AIG), which it had sold to Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Société Générale. By purchasing these contracts, the banks received a "back-door bailout" of 100 cents on the dollar for the contracts. Had the New York Fed allowed AIG to fail, the contracts would have been worth much less, resulting in much lower costs for any taxpayer-funded bailout. Geithner defended his use of unprecedented amounts of taxpayer funds to save the banks from their own mistakes, saying the financial system would have been threatened. At the January 2010 congressional hearing into the AIG bailout, the New York Fed initially refused to identify the counterparties that benefited from AIG's bailout, claiming the information would harm AIG. When it became apparent this information would become public, a legal staffer at the New York Fed e-mailed colleagues to warn them, lamenting the difficulty of continuing to keep Congress in the dark. Jim Rickards calls the bailout a crime and says "the regulatory system has become captive to the banks and the non-banks". Interstate Commerce Commission Historians, political scientists, and economists have often used the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), a now-defunct federal regulatory body in the United States, as a classic example of regulatory capture. The creation of the ICC was the result of widespread and longstanding anti-railroad agitation. Richard Olney, a prominent railroad lawyer, was asked by a railroad president if he could do something to get rid of the ICC. Olney, who later was appointed Attorney General in the Grover Cleveland administration, replied in an 1892 letter, While the Interstate Commerce Act forbade "undue and unreasonable prejudice" against interstate passengers, in the sixty-six years before Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (1955) the ICC had ruled against every black petitioner bringing a racial segregation complaint, earning the nickname "The Supreme Court of the Confederacy". The ICC then failed to enforce