http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34636037/ns/business-us_business/

Whatcha think? I need a job some day with a severance package of several million dollars.

Hard to blame her. Though it's all fake (like the rest of our economy), most of the people there are legitimately bringing in those levels of fake value to the company while they competently wind down those derivatives vs. writing them off.

Boo-hoo. Her deserved compensation was negative millions. Those people aren't legitimately bringing in anything more than a local loan shark is legitimately bringing in pay-day advances. If we had anything resembling a functioning government, all those people would be in jail.

Those people aren't legitimately bringing in anything more than a local loan shark is legitimately bringing in pay-day advances.

As long as they're unwinding derivatives that we own a stake in, it's silly to drive them away out of spite. Especially when what they did is barely different than what the government does every day (and the government is no stranger to seemingly unfair salaries during this downturn (http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/12/11/more-federal-workers-make-six-figures-in-the-recession/) either).

The most unique thing about AIG in this mess is that their name is the easiest to remember when someone wants to take out their frustration.

I would counter than many of those federal salaries are simply keeping closer track with real inflation while the salaries of the public have stagnated, and that's largely a red herring in any case because those people are at least nominally accountable for their work or lack thereof.

AIG, Goldman, CITI, et al, aren't unwinding derivatives, they're replacing them with newer, just as baseless faux securities while continuing to loot public coffers. None of them deserve a damn dime, much less 250-300 times more much money than people who actually work. AIG's name is easiest to remember, but that's because they were the biggest example of excessive incompetence.

All these business jackoffs wax philosophical about pay for performance, but when you not merely lost, but destroyed trillions of dollars, your performance dictates that you should be paying for it, not vice versa. Every single one of those morons can get a new job, preferably at McDonalds. Really, where would the boards be find a worse group of replacements?

You could possibly sell me that some middle manager at a subsidiary didn't know that some other group in his organization was in the process of trying to destroy the world's economy, but these people had no excuse not to be aware and in most cases were directly involved.

The people leftover at AIGFP definitely are unwinding the derivatives they created. That's all they've been doing for a year or more, shutting down the subsidiary for as little loss as possible.

Paying them millions may be distasteful to some, but it's a great deal compared to the alternative. In fact, if they did close AIGFP down cold and dump those derivatives at fire-sale prices, it would only be a matter of time before someone realized how wasteful that was and cried foul about that instead. It makes no sense at all to sell things like airplane leases for pennies on the dollar just because they happened to be wrapped up in dead weight when the market crashed.

And come on, you can't complain about the gains being fake in one post, then blame them as if real money disappeared in the next. Our economy is as fake as fake could be. The dollar is all but an oil and military backed derivative itself. Arbitrarily drawing a line between The Fed and AIG makes it easier to point at a boogieman, but is not rational.

The Fed doing something bad being an excuse for AIGFP doing something as bad or worse is about as cogent as the "but Clinton!" retort so common a few years ago. We are capable of judging actions in isolation and other malefactors making the actions more common does make them any less wrong. Nowhere have I ever indicated the Fed should not be accountable, in fact I consider the Fed and most of the investment banks that have a death-embrace with world financial fairy tale to be part of the same incestuous pool of incompetence and greed.

Unwinding AIGFP at best possible return might have made sense before the Fed went and gave out a few trillion dollars at 0% interest to anyone who already had a few billion, but at this point we can safely reason that everything that touches the entire financial trading system has been completely co-opted by the principals therein, and I wasn't thinking of an answer involving fire-sales so much as actual real life burning fire. Lots of fire.

We are capable of judging actions in isolation and other malefactors making the actions more common does make them any less wrong.

Maybe you and I are capable of that, but look at the general public. Outside of groups mostly denounced as fringe and kooks, there is very little understanding (or interest) about the similarities between what AIGFP did and what keeps our economy running every day.

I find it unbearably hypocritical that AIG is a lightening rod for all of this righteous indignation, while the same people praise the government for using the same mechanisms to "save" us.

Americans? Hypocritical? Say it ain't so!

I seen this on the news the other night:

Goldman set aside about $16.5 billion for salary, bonuses, and benefits for its 26,000 employees. That averages to more than $600,000 a person.

26,000 people making some serious BANK.

The pay whining, oh the total inhumanity:


WHERE EVERYONE IS ABOVE AVERAGE

And they did shoot high. To take a near-comic example, the firms did not present a single executive as meriting a pay grade below the 50th percentile of their supposed peer group, according to two people in Feinberg’s office. In fact, all 136 of the executives (the 25 top earners for each of the seven companies, less 39 who left during the year) were depicted as well above average, typically in the 75th percentile or higher. And the peer groups they were supposed to be in were often inflated; for example, someone running a unit might be portrayed as a chief executive because, the argument went, he ran a really big unit.

Beyond that, the proposals ran roughshod over the basic guidelines Feinberg had set. Bank of America’s pitch included salaries that far exceeded Feinberg’s stricture that cash be limited in most cases to about $500,000, and added huge amounts of salarized stock on top of that, so that the bank’s total compensation proposals were typically more than $10 million and ran to as much as $21 million. (J. Steele Alphin, Bank of America’s chief administrative officer, declined to comment on the bank’s submissions to Feinberg.)

Citigroup also proposed salaries in cash and stock far higher than instructed, and it ignored the guideline that salarized stock would have to be held for two to four years. It proposed that a third of it could be sold immediately

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Compensation-t.html


Someone please bail these bankers out of only making 100 times national median income. After all, they're all so good at what they do!

I seen this on the news the other night:

[/b]

26,000 people making some serious BANK.
I would suspect, however, that 26,000 people didn't receive an even split of that cash, and a few individuals made bigger bank than others. I'm too lazy to do the research however.

Kanyli beat me too it. betting a 1000 made bank and the other 25,000 probably got a really nifty gift certificate for a Honey baked ham.

Now this guy made some bank. Thanks in part to the gov. bail out. If only I had followed my gut and bought bank shares. I was a little to scared of what gov control would mean thou to any possible return.

http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/108451/fund-boss-made-7-billion-in-the-panic?mod=career-leadership



to many people made money off this bank bail out, but that is part of the redistribution of wealth. At least people arent picketing the execs houses anymore. If not because of the cold weather the fact so many wall streeters rushed out and got concealed handgun permits.