From Huffington Post:

After its bonus payments ignited a firestorm of criticism earlier this year, American International Group Inc. is asking the federal government to weigh in on the insurer’s plan to resume paying millions in promised retention incentives next week, according to media reports.

AIG, once the world’s largest insurer, has asked the Obama administration’s compensation czar, Kenneth R. Feinberg, to approve the payments in order to head off any public outrage, The Washington Post reported Thursday evening.

The budget of my company’s clients have been cut in half due to the economy. We’re just hanging on, really, in hopes that things will bet better by the end of the year. Most people are in the same boat, well, except for Taylor Swift who seems to be doing very well.

Meanwhile, you have these shitbirds at AIG arriving at the rationale that they must pay millions out, once again in less than a year, to these pigs who:

a) can’t get by on half a million or more,

b) have so many offers from other tainted financial institutions that they can string along their current company for more of OUR money,

c) are simply the vessel to which companies like AIG continue to play loose and fast with other people’s money and align their own pockets, or

d) have compromising photos of all the top executives at this firm and can bribe them for whatever they want.

One of my old bosses was a guy who made it big as a commercial director many years back (he is now gone) and was driven EVERYWHERE around Manhattan because he no longer had a license nor did he need one. It was the first time I heard someone utter the phrase, “Once you step into the limo, you never step out.” The difference with this man is he actually worked his way into his position, arrogant as he was.

These paper pushers at AIG are speculators - bad one’s at that - and the failure of that company is incentive enough for NO ONE there to receive one cent more than their previous salary (if that).

I am so fucking sick and tired of these companies insulting my intelligence with this bullshit about how their “best and brightest” will fly the coop if they don’t plop down another million or more in front of them to keep them on. Here’s a word of advice: YOU DON’T HAVE ANY BEST AND BRIGHTEST! THEY ARE WITH THE FIRMS THAT DON’T NEED TAXPAYER BAILOUT MONEY! Your best and brightest are responsible for this mess, and this culture of throwing six to seven figures around like it’s monopoly money is an insult TO EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN WHO REALLY WORKS!

My wife and I live in New York. We make a combined salary of 185,000. We consider ourselves pretty lucky and relatively well-off, even though the national consensus is that we are simply middle class here in New York. Well, let me tell you something. We still take vacations. We still save for our kid’s college education. We still pay all of our bills without worrying (partly because we bought a house we could afford and not a McMansion we couldn’t to show off), we save for retirement and life is not tough - so this suggestion that these fuckheads can’t get by on their base salary (which could be anywhere from $150,000 to $650,000) is a big, steaming pile of crap.

Money is not money to these people. It’s poker chip. Status. A way to measure their shallow lives against that of the broker friend in the next cubicle who just got a summer home in Nantucket and asks you where you’re taking your summer?

The rest of us are paying our taxes and that money is finding it’s way into these people’s pockets - and mind you, they don’t appreciate the weight of that. All that matters to them is that they are getting as much as Jimmy over at Goldman Sachs because they can’t afford that new Lotus unless they do.

I’ll never fault someone who really earns their money, but most of these shitheads don’t. They do menial jobs that anywhere else would be considered middle management - and they’re fleecing us for all we have as we struggle to work through this year. Dicks.

Current News AIG, wall street bonuses

Being the type of person who works hard for a living and makes a wage comparable to the work I do, it has always been grotesque to me the kind of compensation those in the financial industry receive as a standard of business. It’s one thing if those making these enormous amounts were the greatest sales people in the world or created something innovative and unique, but most of them are run-of-the-mill employees and sales people who couldn’t sell water to a fish if they really had to.

These people don’t deserve their bonuses and here’s why:

When people have money, where does that money go? It goes in a bank or a financial management institution. No one is keeping it under their pillow. A few people are investing it directly in hopes of making profits through other businesses. But not the majority. The majority of the United States sticks their money in a bank, mostly in money market accounts and mutual funds. Now, unlike my business where you have to do a song and dance just to convince people you have value to them, a bank does not suffer from this fate (well, until recently). If you decided to pursue a job as a broker, very likely you’d be able to find people to give you money. It’s not as hard as selling someone on investing in a movie. You’ve got a bank. You’ve got thousands of employees. You have many mutual funds and products and the odds are some of them are giving decent returns even if others are not. It’s the luck of the draw with large companies.

So, really, how hard do you have to sell someone - as a bank employee, a financial planner or a fund operator - on your products and their need to give their money to you. In my opinion, pretty easy. Sure, you might have to wine and dine the deep pocketed a little (one the company’s dime, not yours), but in the end it’s like selling the popular car on the lot; you KNOW people are going to come looking for it.

Therefore, my disgust with the multi-million dollar bonuses afforded these assholes at AIG and banking firms is enormous. THEY HAD THE EASIEST SALES JOB IN THE WORLD. Give me money. I’ll get you 10%. 15%. 20%. Just look at my fund/money market/ira/etc.

Do they deserve some bonus for bringing in business? Sure. Something reasonable. But the majority of the money made from these accounts SHOULD GO IN THE POCKET OF THE PERSON GIVING THEM THE MONEY!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I knew a secretary on Wall Street making $225,000 ten years ago. She wasn’t even involved in selling. I have other friends who work in different firms. Only one of them is a trader. The others have salaries of $150,000 or more - and still get substantial 6 figure bonuses for doing nothing more than pushing paper and knowing a few things. Reason? There’s ALOT of clients. It’s a bank. EVERYONE who ever put money into a bank is a client that they can manipulate profits from - sometimes for doing NOTHING.

Given the state of America, there needs to be some consideration for the users of banks over the brokers who know very little. Most of Wall Street is legalized gambling. They can call it whatever they want, but that’s all it is. If they knew anything, why would be where we are now?

Current News AIG, bank compensation, million dollar bonuses, wall street bonuses

From NYT:

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.
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Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them.

The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation. Mr. Geithner last week pressured A.I.G. to cut the $9.6 million going to the top 50 executives in half and tie the rest to performance.

It’s 100% certain from this news item that Wall Street - and particularly AIG - doesn’t give a shit about any of us - shareholders, taxpayers, Americans or, for that matter, our government.

In the midst of an economic crisis that rivals the great depression, what is of primary importance to this company is honoring the contracts of hundreds of vice presidents, stock brokers and money managers who have proven themselves incompetent at their jobs.

It must be nice to have a position where nothing short of destroying the world will deprive you of your million dollar bonus. If I knew, when I was a teenager, that the best jobs out there were the ones where you can produce nothing, gamble with United States money, show a failure in profit for it and then become a millionaire doing so - I would still have condemned the practice but possibly considered it if it were LEGAL - which it is.

Everyone - and I mean everyone - who participated in this grand theft of this country’s future is at fault. Actually, more than at fault. They are the poster-people for indifference. When they eventually meet their maker - if they even believe in that - it is my hope that our God takes into consideration the pain, death and disruption they have created. For every master of the universe who put 10 million dollars in on a short sell and won or lost that money, there are millions of honest Americans who’ve trusted their 401k’s or their brokers and found that investment destroyed by these short-sighted children.

I sincerely hope every one of these people get what’s coming to them. It is no longer a time where your actions are devoid of consequences. You’ve destroyed this country. You’ve left millions destitute. Due to the financial earthquake you’ve created, you’ve kept thousands or more from getting treatment that could save them or make their lives more comfortable because of them not being able to afford it anymore. All of this the result of your greed and self-absorption.

You are the evil that we’ve tried to avoid. Not al qaeda. They hurt us for one day. You’ve hurt us for a generation. Assholes.

Current News, Politics AIG, bonuses, lawsuits, stimulus bill, wall street criminals

Courtesy Lorenblog.wordpress.com

Great article from Robert Reich from Salon: about the curious connections and convenient decisions within Bush’s first bailout program:

When it turns out that people like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who took home $68 million in 1997, was the only Wall Streeter in a meeting last September at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss the initial AIG bailout with Tim Geithner, then New York Fed chair, among others, at the very time Goldman was AIG’s largest trading partner, a distinct scent of self-dealing begins to emanate. When it turns out that Citigroup got a bailout deal last October far more generous than that given to any other distressed bank, when a top Citi executive was advising the Treasury and Fed, the scent increases. Goldman’s past CEO was treasury secretary at that time, by the way, and another former Goldman CEO was a top Citi official and also a former treasury secretary. I am not suggesting anything so crude as corruption. But could it be, given these tangled webs, that — innocently, unintentionally, perhaps even subconsciously — the entire bailout effort was premised on saving these companies rather than protecting the public? Or that the distinction between the two was lost, and still is?

Past experience has taught us not to trust Bush when he’d tell you he was working for “you.” Bush took 8 years of our lives and used them as a money funnel to all his friends and colleagues. From Robert Reich’s perspective here, it appears that, in our darkest financial hour as a country, Bush and his cronies were forming plans to fleece us right out the door, economy be damned.

Why is this a surprise? It shouldn’t be. His dad was the President of the wealthy and connected. The son followed the dad’s footsteps well.

I am so sick and tired of this wheeling/dealing at our expense. It seems to me there are very likely straight-forward options to addressing our economy, but when it becomes one big game for Washington where results mean less than keeping the campaign funders happy, I wonder how we’ll be able to pull ourselves out of this.

It’s as if the most powerful people in the world told the rest of us that they have all the food we’d ever need and none of us will starve if we’re patient. Then, the entire group of them go up to a locked Penthouse suite, divide all of it amongst themselves and devour it all on the spot while we stand on the street below, looking up. Every couple of hours, one of them looks down at us and says, “Don’t worry. We’re making sure you’ll be fine. Just ignore the fact that my face is stuffed like a pig.”

Current News, Politics AIG, Citigroup, George W. Bush, Goldman Sachs, Lloyed Blankfein, stimulus bill, Tim Geitner