A.I.G. to Pay $100 Million in Bonuses After Huge Bailout

No, it was probably from seeing what happened when Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail.

 

Lehman Brothers......the company Tim Geitner thought shouldn't be bailed out.....and then felt AIG should be bailed out? But he's a "very unusually talented young man"...so we should be fine.

 

Why is it that this whole thing looks more and more like a bailout of Goldman Sachs which was orchestrated by their former chairman?

 

What exactly happened to the taxpayers when Lehman failed?

 

Its looked that way for months.

 

Obama, are you in touch here? How much is enough?

 

Because these executive donate money to the politicians. And politicians need money to get re-elected.

Poindexter, I've become more inclined to agree with your viewpoint except for one thing - even if we had let those companies fail, the executives still would have been in far better shape financially and the worker bees still would have gotten SCREWED. Many of these executives have guaranteed contracts and they would have gotten their money out of bankruptcy proceedings. It may have taken longer, sure. But they still would have made out far better than the worker bees.

 

I am not arguing the worker bee/executive screw ratio. That's for the Lehman worker bees.

My point all along is that I and future generations shouldn't be paying for this shit. It's fucking amazing.

Textkindles 100 years in the future are going to write about the government paying trillions of dollars to bail out failed companies - who still got paid millions in bonuses - and in the fall of 2008, most of the dopes in this country agreed with it!!

 

Oh, and just to put the cherry on top: According to this NY Times article, bonuses are going directly to the people who dealt in the derivatives area... the same derivatives group that has pretty much toppled the US economy:
The anger peaked over the weekend when correspondence surfaced showing that A.I.G. was on the brink of paying rich bonuses to executives who had dealt in the derivative contracts at the center of A.I.G.’s troubles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/us/politics/16assess.html
So just to recap, because apparently we have a lot of dopes in this country:

*A group of traders in a small office in London wrote the contracts which nearly singlehandedly brought down the United States. These guys did more damage than Bin Laden or Hitler in trying to take down our country.

*The United States bails out the company, and their counterparties to the tune of trillions.

*Said traders and execs get handsomely rewarded with million dollar bonuses for the privilege of taking down our country with risky trades.


You couldn't make this shit up if you were writing a Twilight Zone episode.

 

Precisely.

 

So how do people feel about this?
From Politico ...

 

If you are opposed to the general idea of bailing out AIG to protect the international financial system, then fine. (You're wrong, but that's okay).

But you'd have to be pretty ignorant to think it's a good idea to only bail out U.S. banks.