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In the old movie Wall Street we were told that greed is good, although it is one of the seven deadly sins. Actually the foremost in my mind, since all the other ones are really just greed for something specific (food, sex, leisure, etc.). And now this whole AIG debacle has made the letters stand for Arrogance Incompetence Greed. Just the kind of image you would want your company to have. Anyway, I think all the outrage is an outrage. It is not as if this comes as any surprise. I mean that the corporate high fliers help themselves to amazing riches, on the dime of the general public. If it’s not tax payers’ money it’s the pension funds for you and me that buy the stocks that keep theses fat cats fat. In the case of the AIG financial people that just got their money, I can understand the underlying reason for wanting to pay them the award. You know that you’re in for a tough time and you need to decouple certain things as fast as possible, and to make sure that it’s timely you tell the people that knows the mess from the inside that if you stay with the company and help us wind this down we’ll pay you a little bit extra at the end. So far I fully agree. And I think that maybe two or three months salary would be a reasonable amount. After all, they are getting paid in the mean time anyway. But the amounts that they got paid.

Sheesh! If $6.2 million is equivalent to a year’s salary, that person should have been fired on the spot for getting AIG into the situation they were. And what does congress do? They do what they should have done long ago. They make sure that there is a law that caps the payments for companies getting bailed out by public funds. After all, the alternative is bankruptcy, which would pay most people very little, if anything. But the irony of the House of Congress bill is that that most of the AIG Finance people are located in London, UK, and as far as I know they are not affected by US tax law. So they still get their money untouched. All this while AIG is suing the IRS to get some tax money back. They are suing their majority owner. That’s some cojones. Continue reading “American International Greed”