AIG employees starting to return bonuses, CEO says

According to Yahoo Finance:

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he wants legislation to give the federal government vast new powers over financial institutions like AIG to protect the public.

This is NOT a good thing. Government is not supposed to control private business. This business should have failed. Why did government step in and prevent it? THAT is NOT government's job.

Obama, speaking to reporters at the White House, said the powers would be similar to those now exercised over banks by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It would be part of the administration's broader package of new finance regulatory steps, he said.

Insurance isn't financial. Am I missing a step?

Since AIG is an insurance company and not a bank, it is not subject to the same oversight.

Well, somebody else connected those dots too. Bonus points for them.

"We've got a big mess that we're having to clean up," the president said.

YOU don't have to clean it up. It's NOT YOUR JOB. If you want to run THAT business, then become the president of THAT company and quit trying to be the president of THAT company by using your President of the US hat.

"Nobody here drafted those contracts" that resulted in the bonuses being paid out to AIG employees, he added.

No, you just bailed 'em out.

Obama also defended his administration -- and specifically Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner -- against questions about its handling of the AIG fiasco.

"Nobody here was responsible for supervising AIG and allowing themselves to put the economy at risk by some of the outrageous behavior that they were engaged in," Obama said.

Now, however, "the buck stops with me," he said. "And my goal is to make sure that we never put ourselves in this kind of position again."

One more time, that's NOT your job.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the Financial Services Committee, demanded that the company submit to Congress a list "of people who received the bonuses, whether they paid them back or not." If the names were not provided "without restriction," Frank warned, he would ask the committee to vote to subpoena them.

Liddy said he would "comply with the law:" but was "concerned about the safety of our people."

He said he would give the names of the bonus recipients only on the basis of confidentiality. He read aloud threats that AIG employees had received, including one that suggested that all bonus recipients should be "executed with piano wire around their necks."

Another one read: "If the government can't do this properly, we the people will take it in our own hands and see that justice is done. I'm looking for all the CEOs' names, kids, where they live, etc."

And now another guy wants to do things that aren't his job. Government's job was to leave things alone. And government failed. Big surprise.

Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, the senior Republican on the subcommittee, complained that the administration still has no strategy for disentangling itself from the insurance giant.

"Part of me wants to say to some of the loudest critics, 'What did you expect and why weren't you asking more questions before?' I would argue that the real outrage now is the $170 billion of taxpayer money that's been pumped into this company and to what effect," he said.

Finally someone on Capitol Hill that actually has some sense.

The retention payments -- ranging from $1,000 to nearly $6.5 million -- were put together in early 2008, long before then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asked Liddy to take over the company. Liddy, the retired former chief of Allstate Insurance Co., is not getting a bonus and is drawing only $1 a year in salary.

"No one knows better than I that AIG has been the recipient of generous amounts of governmental financial aid. We have been the beneficiary of the American people's forbearance and patience," he said. But he also said that "we have to continue managing our business as a business -- taking account of the cold realities of competition for customers, for revenues and for employees."

The company started doing what companies do when it's time for them to die. Trying to reanimate them, zombie style, by injecting them with misappropriated taxpayer dollars IS NOT A SOLUTION.

The clamor over compensation overshadowed AIG's weekend disclosure that it had paid out more than $90 billion of the federal aid to foreign and domestic banks, including some that had multibillion-dollar U.S. government bailouts of their own.

Well, one thing this administration has shown in the first 3 months. They're extremely efficient at wasting our taxpayer dollars... and getting NOTHING in value in return for it.

Great job there Mr. President Guy.

In case anyone can't tell, I'm pretty pissed. Though how you could miss that, I'll never know.