AIG gets taxpayer bailout...BONUS?

[moosmom]

Puckstop,

Get over yourself will ya? Crawl back under the rock you slithered out from.

[carole]

Puckstop it is obvious you don't know Donna very well, or you would not have made such a silly remark.

I have to agree you seem to like to stir things up here.,but hey you are entitled to your opinion like everyone else .

[cassiesmom]

I saw Rep. Frank from Massachusetts (?) or Connecticut (?) on the "News Hour" with Jim Lehrer on WTTW. I don't know much about either Frank or Lehrer (conservative vs. liberal). But Frank said 2 things I had not thought of. The first one makes sense to me. The second one, I don't know how they would make that work.

First - When this bail-out was being planned at the end of the Bush administration into the beginning of Obama's Presidency, the government gave the money to AIG with no conditions attached to it. That is, they did not tell AIG beforehand that AIG could not use the money to pay bonuses -- whether the people who were up for bonuses were entitled to them or not.

Also, since the government has now given AIG so much money, they pretty much own the company, so theoretically they are entitled to some say in how that money is distributed. (this was Rep. Frank talking)

However, AIG contends that they need to pay bonuses to retain the best people in order to earn back the funds to repay American taxpayers.

*sticks head in sand*

[blue]

A little perspective here, from what I can tell the bonus's and retention pay amount to $730.6 million. $730.6 million out of $170 billion is 0.1013%.

AIG got the money without enough strings attached.

[Puckstop31]

Puckstop,

Get over yourself will ya? Crawl back under the rock you slithered out from.

Good grief people....

Just good grief....

[cassiesmom]

Okay, I have another question that shows how little I truly understand this situation. Remember when the phone companies had to be split up because they constituted a monopoly? They were a lot smaller, and then some of them merged with each other, and then there were more mergers and now there are huge companies again (for example: Illinois Bell -> Ameritech -> SBC -> AT&T). Why was that not done with AIG? Why was AIG allowed to continue to operate as one enormous corporation that was recently deemed "too big to fail", instead of being split out into its component businesses? Will the company be divvied up now, I wonder?

Thanks,
Elyse

[smokey the elder]

Part of the conditions of the "bailout" is that AIG sell parts of itself to pay back Uncle Sam (read: us taxpayers.) Unfortunately, with the credit market mired in the Ice Age, and cash flow nonexistent until recently, there was no one in the market for the pieces.

[blue]

THe same congress braying about bonuses, gives themselves a $93,000 increase EACH* in spending money!!!!??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNRt9R7S8aM

*Edit