Friday, December 12, 2008
AIG gives "Retention Payments" to Top Executives
We bought AIG to save the insurance giant from insolvency. One of the conditions on our several hundred billion dollar bailout was that the top executives forgo bonuses. That sounds pretty clear and reasonable. They had been taking an economic nose dive while continuing to give millions in bonuses and golden parachutes to executives responsible for making decisions that drove the Insurance giant into the ground. So, now that we own 80% of the company, they are giving "retention payments" to executives. So a bonus for failure is now a "retention payment". Sounds like we are getting fucked again. Since we are the majority stockholder of AIG, I say we fire their asses.
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10 comments:
'fire their asses'?
There should be something a little more creative.... tie them to stakes and burn them? Subject them to videos of Jim Nabors singing? Make them eat broccoli?
Firing may be too painless.... and then they would want severance pay...... in the millions.
Good point. Lets get all medieval on their asses. Or go very native, savage if you will and skin them alive before we set their hair on fire.
Hi-
They should all be forced to live on 'welfare wages', about $14.00 per day. Their 401 k's should be given to the needy and they should be forced to forfeit ALL their assets and financial holdings to 'the people'.
Once they are vulnerable and worried about how the will keep a roof over their head or buy food which I am sure thyy have no clue, then we can talk and they WILL listen.
Gail
peace.....
I look forward to the day when out of work brokers and bankers have to take Obama jobs rebuilding the highways, sewers and bridges.
Have you also noticed the main reason for taking down the auto makers appears to be to get rid of unions?
I agree with Susan--it's union busting plain and simple.
Yeah, fucked without a kiss. If I fuck up my job, I get fired. If they fuck up, they get a bonus. What's wrong with this picture?
Gail already said everything I believe. I think we should put her in charge.
how rethuglican of them! if you are going to do something really scummy, change the wording.
i think they should be forced to look at pictures of cheney while listening to piped-in speeches of chimpy 24/7.
If there's any justice in this world, all of the above will happen to these fuckers. They have no perspective about what's really going on in the world.
I know AIG very well. I met Hank Greenberg in 1994 when I was pitching my first fund (Russian equities) with my partners. I'm a hard person to shock but I have to say I was shocked at the way they did business then.
AIG is only partly an insurance company. Otherwise, it's a bacchanal for action junkies. Greenberg never had a single year with that company when he wasn't embroiled in some scandal or other and he was the voice of reason at the place and he was a psychopath for action.
They'd put on the most complex multi-layered highly-leveraged positions you could imagine, each one of them with carrying a risk-of-ruin greater than 3%.
When Greenberg left (and he was so sick that he was actually comfortable and at home with gambling at this level and had some extreme notion of what was "too crazy") all the cultural stoppers came off just as the markets got less and less regulated and the mark-to-market rules looser and looser.
Greenberg actually wanted to buy the whole thing back at $2/share but Paulson wouldn't let him. He might have brought a tiny bit of self-control back to the place. Paulson, Bush, the leadership and Obama are just giving the junkies free heroin.
At any rate, this is the last place whose "officers" you want to reward for gross negligence.
But please when Obama's president at Geithner's giving AIG execs quarterly bonus in the 10s of millions and Obama calls it "stimulus" or "injecting liquidity" please attack with the same ferocity.
You really all should be attacking now but I know the champagne is still on ice and everybody's excited. I'm not. I know it's a one-party system.
So, I'm far away and drinking Seco instead and glad that my president is boring, rich, white, untransformative, unthematic Martin Torrijos whose mark-to-market bank laws are very strict.
Irresponsibility, negligence, mismangement, fraud and moral hazard know no skin color or party.
Yeah, Chimpy's a dick and all, but please ask ONE Democrat to explain to you in plain English what a "non-deliverable forward contract" or a "total return swap" is. I assure you not Obama, not Biden, not one Democratic governor nor Senator nor Representative could do it. And no Repubicans either.
And those things are like saltines and peanut butter compared to sumptous banquet of trades and positions that AIG had on.
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