Subscribe to Moronmeter!3 Great Quotes from the AIG Bonus Kerfuffle!
Here are three great quotes that have come out of the AIG bonus kerfuffle. Enjoy!
1) ABCNews.com provides us with this nice bit of analysis in their article Could Be Worse: AIG Double Bonus Jeopardy.
While critics like Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., argue that the time has come to fire AIGFP employees, Russell Miller, the managing director of Executive Compensation Advisors, said there may still be reason to retain them.
“The difficulty here is that the same people who got us into this mess, we need them to help us turn it around, and we’re doing that with taxpayer dollars,” he said.
“We need to develop a plan that recognizes that: 1) this is a legal obligation and 2) these employees are needed to help turn the company around and 3) these employees likely want to continue working at AIG given the current market environment [emphasis added],” Miller said.
Seriously? Do you really think that the employees who helped tank AIG would “likely want to continue working” there “given the current market environment”? I don’t know about anyone else, but if I had an employer who was willing to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to sit around and lose billions for them then give hundreds of thousands (if not millions) more in “retention-payments”, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather continue working. Seriously, if anyone has a position open like this (especially with one of those AIG approved, iron-clad employment agreements) let me know, I am totally qualified!
2) Also from ABCNews.com, the Political Punch blog, by Jake Tapper, recounts this exchange between Tapper and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs (Two Weeks Ago: White House Says It’s Confident It Knows What Happened to Previous AIG Billions).
TAPPER: AIG, is the administration confident that it, that it knows what happened to the tens of billions of dollars previously given to AIG?
GIBBS: Is it confident — I’m sorry?
TAPPER: That they know — that you guys know what happened to the previous billions before you hand over this next $30 billion.
GIBBS: Yes — yes, the — I mean, I don’t think it’s a — well, obviously, you’ve got a huge insurance company that is losing money, not the least of which because of its sheer size and sheer size and decrease in the growth in our economy. It experiences a far bigger drop, largely because of its size. But, again, the steps that — that Treasury and — and others took were to ensure a larger systemic problem wasn’t one that we had to deal with here today in letting something just die.
TAPPER: But in terms of specifically the — I guess it’s like $150 billion before, you guys are confident…
GIBBS: Yes.
I assume Mr. Gibbs is using the political definition of the word “Yes”, which is “until proven otherwise”. Interestingly, this is also the political definition of the word “no”.
3) The New York Times had this quote from Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., in a March 14th piece (A.I.G. Planning Huge Bonuses After $170 Billion Bailout – NYTimes.com.):
“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.
Mr. Liddy is refering to the executives in the AIG Financial Products group – the ones at the center of AIG’s $100 billion dollar loss. These are “the best and the brightest talent”, eh? Holy crap, we are in trouble.
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