American International Group (AIG) is now simply trying to pay back the taxpayer after its massive bailout, CEO Edward Liddy said -- and while he said there could be more problems ahead if the economy continues to deteriorate, he feels there’s a good chance the company can pay everything back.

In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday night, Liddy acknowledged that the company has “a unique place, and not a very desirable place” in public opinion, because it has had to get such a far-reaching bailout package due to the financial crisis -- the U.S. has committed $180 billion or more to the company.

Right now, “we’re just trying to do the best we can to pay back the taxpayer,” Liddy said. “If the economy deteriorates any more, I think there are more problems out there,” he noted. But he maintained that “we have a plan” and “we think we stand an excellent chance” of repaying the bailout money.

AIG, and in particular its hedge-fund-like Financial Products unit, is widely believed to have nearly brought down the company and possibly even the global economy last fall as the financial crisis reached an apex. Liddy, who had retired as CEO of Allstate and was serving on the board of directors at Goldman Sachs, was asked by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to take the helm of the company. He’s earning a salary of $1 a year.

“If somebody calls and says, ‘Will you help your country?’ you say yes,” Liddy said in the interview. He said that in some ways he knew what he was getting into with the role, but in some regards he didn’t.

The political aspect in particular -- dealing with taxpayer outrage, Congressional hearings and the like -- is “new, and somewhat terrifying,” Liddy said.

Liddy said the first thing he did when he got to the company was say the Financial Products division would be shut down.

“We strayed from our core skills” in insurance and the like by creating AIG FP. The things going on at that division were mostly done by 20 or 30 people, he said -- and the modus operandi there required “a belief that models are always right… It assumes that the kind of risks that were viewed to be so remote could not occur. But in fact, they did occur.”

Liddy noted in the interview that AIG FP, while not shut down yet, will be “substantially” de-risked by the end of the year; he said it has already unloaded about half of its risky bets, though it still has about $1.5 trillion still on the books.

Liddy acknowledged that AIG FP still employs many of the people who were around during the time the riskiest bets were made, and that “we’re asking them to un-trade them.” He asserted that “the people who built up those models” and that got the company so deeply into trouble “are out.”

“We had some resignations,” he said.

Liddy said that people in the AIG FP division were “still traumatized” by public anger, which flared up in particular when it was revealed that people in that division had gotten $165 million in bonuses for 2008. He even said the angry attention that AIG receives is hindering the sale of certain assets.

AIG will “be much smaller and it’ll look a whole lot different” once the whole process is done, Liddy said.