more AIG

[mattycub]

In response to my post yesterday, Greg mondragon brought up a reasonable point. Since my response to it is as long as a normal post, I thought I'd repurpose it as a post. Double content generation points! Greg's comment:

I appreciate you taking the time to write this, but one question pops out at me: there are two assumptions here - one is that there are

Comments

[jaybear]

I agree with you completely.

I've been auditing this stuff for the past two years, since I moved to Boston, and I honestly don't fully understand 90% of it. Luckily, the people who have been there years more than I have do, for the most part.

My honest estimate is that someone brought in from outside to dismantle the portfolio should probably have at least 8 or 10 years experience in order to do it efficiently and without an abundance of costly errors. Anyone who has been doing it for that long is making at absolute minimum $500,000 year at wherever they are coming in from. And if they live in NY Metro, I'm guessing closer to $1 million. At a minimum.

[shake_it_up]

A couple of points

[sunflower1969]

As I said in our discussion re this:

I don't know if this is possible, but if I were AIG and I had a sense of the shitstorm this was going to cause, I would've gotten everyone together in a room who was owed these bonuses, and asked them to defer their receipt pending successful winding up of the $1.6T position.

I also think the government could've been a bit heavyhanded about it, because if the only people who can get AIG out of the arcane and complex positions AIG twisted itself into are the ones who got AIG into it, those people have some explaining to do. Securities laws and insurance regulations may have become a lot more lax of late but they haven't become nonexistent. When Obama on Leno th'other night said "Most of this stuff was perfectly legal" I'm dubious. When the government wants to make something criminal, it usually can.

I wish I didn't feel that a lot of this is because Bush, and Obama, have hired people who are neck deep in this shit to run things.

Paul Krugman for Treasury Secretary!