It's entirely possible that I'm way off base here, and I have no concrete information to back up my hypothesis, but I've been thinking a lot about A.I.G.
The one thing I have heard is that those bonuses were called "retention bonuses" by the media. To me, that opens up a whole new set of possibilities that no one else seems to be contemplating.
Suppose, just for a moment, that the people who were slated to receive these bonuses were the really big brains of the operation. This seems like a fairly reasonable assumption - it's unlikely that secretaries or custodians are raking in the big bucks.
I've also heard that it was one division of A.I.G., their Financial Services division, that went totally to crap and caused the majority of their meltdown. So let's further suppose that these deep thinking bonus grabbers are not part of the Financial Services division, or at least that most of them are not. This also seems reasonable to me. At a minimum, it's possible, if not likely. Corporations are in business to make money - they do not do that by rewarding those who fail.
So now we are talking about rewarding people who were not responsible for the problem, and may be the only hope for saving the company. We, as taxpayers, now have a considerable stake, $175 billion worth, in A.I.G. Should we not be wishing for the company to succeed? Is it not in our own personal best interest for them to turn this thing around and make fistfuls of dollars? What is the likelihood of them being able to do that if all of their best and brightest minds jump ship? If they lose the people of ability, how can they ever beome successful again? It just seems to me that we should be cheerleading for these people, crossing our fingers and hoping that they can pull off a minor miracle, not condemning them and taxing them into the poor house. If one-tenth of one percent of the money we have given them can help make them profitable again by retaining their people of talent, then I'm all for it!
Once again, our government has put us in a highly unfavorable position by bailing A.I.G. out in the first place; now they are compounding that error by stripping A.I.G. of any hope of ever being able to repay that bailout. And the sheeple, as usual, just aren't paying attention.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
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Of course you are correct. Do people actually think that these boards of directors and executive officers are stupid? Do you think they give away millions for the hell of it? That they diminish the bottom line and so diminish their own performance in the eyes of their stockholders, just because they want to reward some losers?
ReplyDeleteIt's the people in the White House and the Capitol who are the crooks, and when they get caught with their own brains down, they scream "fire" so no one will notice their wrongdoing.