By DealBook March 3, 2009 1:20 pm March 3, 2009 1:20 pm

The American International Group has drawn scorn from legions of taxpayers and lots of lawmakers (not to mention the writers at Saturday Night Live ). And Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is pretty peeved at the company as well.

Mr. Bernanke spoke on Tuesday of his ire about the governments multibillion-dollar rescues of A.I.G. when asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, At what point will the taxpayer no longer be on the hook for the massive A.I.G. failure? What is the endgame for American taxpayers?

Mr. Bernanke testified that nothing in the recent financial crisis had made him more angry than the debacle at A.I.G. whose financial products division he likened to a hedge fund, taking huge risks that ultimately brought the entire company to its knees.

A.I.G. owns an array of insurance companies around the world, but it was nearly brought down by a unit in London, which agreed to backstop huge amounts of mortgage-backed securities through contracts known as credit-default swaps. When the underlying securities plunged in value, it was nearly overwhelmed by demands for more collateral, forcing the United States government to throw it a lifeline. (And the lifeline keeps getting bigger .)

This was a hedge fund, basically, that was attached to a large and stable insurance company, Mr. Bernanke told lawmakers on Tuesday, later adding, There was no regulatory oversight because there was a gap in the system.

His remarks sound a lot like what Edward M. Liddy, A.I.G.s chief executive for the last six months, told Andrew Ross Sorkin for Tuesdays DealBook column in The New York Times.

Its an interesting structure where you have an insurance company that works really well and on top of it is a holding company, and the holding company’s biggest asset is this huge hedge fund,” Mr. Liddy told Mr. Sorkin. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

As for the senators question how long would A.I.G. be on government life support Mr. Bernanke didnt have a precise answer. But he said the Fed had made strides in minimizing the potential fallout from the companys troubles:

We have been doing what we can to break the company up, to get it into a salable position and to try to defang it. Weve done a lot, for example, to take off some of these dangerous counterparty positions that would create the contagion. So were doing all we can to make it, you know, a safer institution as well as trying to get it to stabilize.