NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — American International Group Inc., the insurer selling units to repay a US loan, may use a "whole spectrum of deals" and keep some businesses until initial public offerings are possible, said restructuring chief Paula Reynolds.

AIG, which first announced its sale strategy in October, awaits new guidelines from the Treasury and Federal Reserve to help potential buyers hobbled by asset losses, Reynolds said this week in an interview. Buyers may be allowed to give stock rather than cash to New York-based AIG or pay less up front in exchange for future payments, she said.

"Instead of flat-out sales for cash, a whole spectrum of deals are being considered," Reynolds, 52, said. "We could take some things off for another day, we could substitute some other properties to accomplish the endgame. You can consider preparing some businesses for an IPO."

AIG plans to sell more than two-thirds of its businesses to repay loans in the $150 billion bailout package it needed after losses tied to the housing market. Chief executive officer Edward Liddy picked Reynolds, former CEO of Safeco Corp., to head the restructuring after she sold Seattle-based Safeco to Liberty Mutual Group Inc. last year for $6.2 billion, 51 percent more than the share price before the deal was announced.

Liddy, 63, said last October that AIG, with operations in 130 countries and more than $1 trillion of assets as of September 30, will sell life-insurance businesses in the US and Asia, an asset manager and a jet-leasing unit. The remaining company will focus on selling property and liability coverage to corporations.

AIG's reliance on selling life-insurance businesses may have been a strategic error after shares of the competitors plunged last year on concern that equity market declines would hurt sellers of annuities, Reynolds said.

"The property and casualty would have held up better to an auction than the life companies," Reynolds said last week. "Now the problem is in order to pay back the government, you're going to have to sell some of each."

Prudential Financial Inc., the second-largest US life insurer, trades at about 65 percent of book value, or assets minus liabilities. MetLife Inc., ranked first, trades at about 88 percent.

"If we'd known that the equity markets would go down and that the marks we'd take on assets would be as significant as they've been, would we have exposed as many of our investment-sensitive assets to the market as we did? Probably not," Reynolds said. AIG has raised $2.3 billion by selling units so far.