'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

AIG execs still acting like bandits

In September, the Bush administration announced it would fork $152 billion over to insurance giant AIG to bail it out of its mounting financial woes. Now, AIG CEO Edward Liddy has confessed in writing to Rep. Elijah Cummings that some 168 senior employees of the firm are being awarded what are called "retention payments", ranging from $92,500 to $4 million this year. (HT: Calculated Risk.)

When will the President and the congressional leadership stop this immoral madness??

Kudos to Rep. Cummings for staying on the case of the greedy card-sharps who run AIG.

The Wall Street Journal is meanwhile reporting that AIG currently owes Wall Street's biggest firms about $10 billion for speculative trades (i.e. bets) that have soured. I can't read the portion of the story that's behind their paywall. But the comments page there is running heavily against the AIG execs who've been letting all this happen.

So what's happening is that $10 billion of our taxpayers' money that Bush and Paulson handed to AIG is now going straight through AIG to other big Wall St. firms-- and those top execs at AIG who have done this to us are expecting us taxpayers to pay them hefty bonuses (under the fancy name of "retention payments") to reward them for their actions... and also, presumably, to make sure they stay on with AIG...

Excuse me? Why does AIG-- or the American people, who now own 79.9 percent of the company-- still "need" these greedy monsters to stay on the firm's payroll?

In case anyone's interested I could tell you I've never earned anything near $92,500 in a single year. Far less $4 million!

But then, I've also never engaged in "speculative trades" with other people's money that helped any institution lose any portion of $10 billion.

Sack the lot of them. Get some competent managers in to run the people's AIG, for goodness' sake.