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The U.S. government and the country's largest life insurer are set for a rematch in a U.S. appeals court today over how federal regulators decide a company is "too big to fail," one of the most significant reforms to come out of the financial crisis, Reuters reported. The heart of the fight is whether the Financial Stability Oversight Council should have designated MetLife Inc. as a "systemically important financial institution." The label indicates that MetLife's collapse could devastate the financial system, and it triggers tighter oversight. MetLife would also have to set aside capital to ensure that it would not need a government bailout during a crisis. In March, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer struck down the designation, saying that the council used an "arbitrary and capricious" process in assessing MetLife's vulnerabilities. She also said that the government should have analyzed costs and benefits to MetLife, the likelihood that it would fail and possible counterparty losses.

More than 11 years after civil charges were filed, New York’s case against Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chief executive of the insurance giant American International Group, goes to trial this week, the New York Times reported today. The charges date to an era when Eliot Spitzer, then the New York State attorney general, brought a barrage of cases accusing Wall Street research analysts of biased research, mutual fund operators of trading practices that shortchanged average investors, and insurance brokers of bid-rigging and kickbacks. Greenberg and AIG’s former chief financial officer, Howard I. Smith, are accused in part of engineering bogus reinsurance transactions in 2000 and 2001 to bolster reserves to make the company’s numbers look better to Wall Street. They are also accused of orchestrating other transactions that allowed AIG to convert insurance losses into investment losses. Greenberg has long denied the allegations. When the charges were brought in May 2005, he accused Spitzer of seeking to retaliate against him for criticizing certain prosecutions.