This is amazing. Slowly discovering the real story. I had initially suggested that AIG was at odds with everyone not employed by AIG, and that holds true both in generous bonuses and the track it took to land us all here. Well, AIG FP at least. Then I watched the grilling of Liddy which showed that he wasn’t even involved in the course of events and was simply following the contractual obligations that AIG had agreed to previously. I had known about Liddy being asked to be CEO due to his experience and that contracts had been in place, but it was all outside of general public consumption. But then a resignation letter landed on NY Times.com which also signified the ignorance that is created when publicly traded companies create contracts with employees, and the company lands in hot water effecting everyone. The public needs to be angry with the real offending entities. Those who created the mess in the first place, but because so much money flew around so fast, no one cared to notice. Well, not exactly true, there were several people who said that removing oversight and regulation would cause problems, but political pressure won out in the wake of money lubricating the deregulation. So, as I told a friend recently, the real problem, like Enron, was the fact that a few “visionaries” found a way to string loopholes and ethical accounting into something that violated the spirit of accounting and law and made something akin to Frankenstein’s Monster. Garnering billions of dollars which we will never be able to recover because it is no in foreign banks and bankers control. The two who are truly responsible are Joseph Cassano and Thomas Savage, the latter who got his start at Drexel Burnham Lambert. Yes, a firm that was involved in junk bond sales and went bankrupt. That little bit was recently written about as well.
So, it appears that information interpreted incorrectly about social mechanisms is just as harmful as financial data interpreted incorrectly. Only through public observation and disclosure to the public did this new information become available. If not for the NY Times announcing this, and popping its head above the sound of classing pitchforks and torches, continuing threats against AIG lives would be heard. I believe they still are, but only because some people are blinded by the anger that a 4-6 million dollar bonus creates in those who can’t imagine that sum of money being so easily distributed. It really is a lot of money to anyone who hasn’t witnessed it on a daily basis. I’ve told people before, that the value of money is its perception of value. Like a Tiffany lamp, or a eating at a fine restaurant instead of Denny’s. All of which can be replicated to equal perceived value… but the quality of the product is in question here. And that is the ethical dilemma that mobs of people must understand. People are fed information, and assume it is real based on who they get that information from.