Comments | kurukami: Fascinating backstory on the AIG implosion.

kurukami

Fascinating backstory on the AIG implosion.

Mar 25, 2009 20:35

Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi wrote one hell of an expose on precisely what AIG made happen to itself, and why all of us taxpayers are screwed as a result of it. It's an illuminating read, and I highly recommend checking it out -- it shows just how fucked we all are because of AIG's malfeasance and scheming.

It's over - we're officially, ( Read more... )

aig, economy, rolling stone, real life

Comments 4

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kurukami March 26 2009, 01:54:57 UTC

It's got very little to do with "being better" at saving and investing -- it's got to do with them being able to cover all the basics and have a ridiculous amount on top of that. Quite a number of rich people lost their shirts with their investments going belly-up in the past year or two, as the economy and the stock market started imploding. And the whole part about "oh, well, their contracts guarantee it", I call bullshit. My contract of employment guarantees profit-sharing at a certain level -- and yet upper management abrogated those contracts and cut our profit-sharing by a substantial amount. Not because the profits are lower, because they aren't that much -- because they're cutting costs to be financially more efficient. There's absolutely no reason why AIG couldn't do the same thing, particularly since they lost $61.5 BILLION in the last three months of 2008 ( ... )

dylanesque29 March 26 2009, 03:46:29 UTC

Not to mention that they engaged in business practices that were questionable at best, and had the numbers spun to look safer than they were in reality. I'm very disappointed that the Beast chose to bail AIG out.

dylanesque29 March 26 2009, 01:47:18 UTC

Completely different departments. I read the letter, and that guy had nothing to do with those CDS cats.

I subscribe to RS for the political journalism, and that article nearly made me fail my Sanity check. There's no way the Fed should have bailed AIG out, and Congress should have been more aggressive about it. But it's nice to see Tabibbi put his shoulder to the wheel and WRITE, instead of his usual attempts to be the new Hunter S Thompson.

kurukami March 26 2009, 02:04:11 UTC

Well, so he says -- but they were both in AIG Financial Products. And yeah, it is good that Taibbi's doing some solid writing.