Nice article Bing. My sentiments exactly. Poor Liddy is taking a beating for $1 while Greenberg declares AIG bonus was tied to performance when he was at the helm. His impudent remarks are not surprising. Actually, Greenberg should be grilled instead, and have him pay back all of his bonuses because under his leadership the company went stray and started chasing after the naked emperor.

The mob demands heads or blood, the French did it during their revolution,the Romans fed the lions at the games…Who is innocent or who is guilty doesn’t matter…

We are entering the blame game phase of this fiasco…

People will be laying the blame on anybody who looks or thinks differently than they do..

The British went from being the richest and most powerful empire in the world to a basket case in 40 years (1910 to 1950).

America is poised to out do the British..ie: faster rise to power, shorter duration and faster fall..

For history buffs the next 10 years are going to be notable..

On a personal note:

I followed the FED’s example: I sold my debt to my self ….got a very good deal, 10 cents on the dollar for toxic assets…now that I’m debt free,,,I’m gonna go down to see my banker about a new loan..

He will be impressed with my business skills..I’m sure…

Hey Bing…

I can understand the whole outrage about getting government funded bonuses to AIG from taxpayer money…

But million dollar bonuses… in general?? I belive that about 90% of anyone, anywhere, who works in finance was asked a question of whether exec’s should be paid the millions in bonuses they wouldnt spend more than a second to agree (espically if they are or could be one of those executives).

It seems like this whole fiasco is an educational lesson for the “average guy” who wouldnt know s**t from shinola in the industry

but whats the solution??… leave it the way it is and be pretty much assured that things will return to normal, as they always have, because the motivation for big $millions$ in bonuses is the complete part of any nutritious corporate breakfast?

OR

try to completley rehaul the system and tell corporate executricksters that their main purpose now is to benefit humanity and not take bonuses?!?!

whats next?? are we going to tell all countries to hold hands and not make war?? how about taking all of our salaries, cut them to the bare minimum required for subsistence and then give the rest to another country because they could really use it?

The point is that greed might not be a good thing, but its engrained into our internal systems. Animals have done it for millions of years– eat the most, procreate the most and try to kill anything that threatens it.

yes we have evloved… but not by much.. there will always be someone in there making trouble in the system… but at the same time its impossible to make a perfect system too. So either extreme (doing nothing v. rehauling the entire system) will have negative effects, gaurenteed

Personally i find that the way things are hasnt caused much problems until there the crash. People who get the millions are happy, and those who think they can get the millions (even if they cant make it) have fun dreaming about it or trying to get there (the realization of losing is another topic)—its just when there is a present accounting of “who has what and how much” then jealousy and greed fight the battle of all battles. Again, i understand the taxpayer issue, but in general this is the deal.

if we take away the dream of making it “big” in corporate america then you change capitalism itself, and this country was FOUNDED on capitalism…. scary stuff.

*J

So what’s new, besides another example of blatant corruption in our mighty financial system?

First G. Gordon, then Scooter, now Edward. Those Liddy’s are a bunch of scoundrels!

I think the whole thing is just a grand show put on in hopes of quelling some of the populist rage. The politicians will get their soundbite and extract their pound of flesh, then things go on as usual. Oh, hey look now…Citigroup’s execs are also teed up to get big bonuses. And the beat goes on.

What we really, need, in this economy, is an “escape goat”!

(Thanks, Jade Goody!)

At what point do we finally say lets cut our losses and move on, what the industry really needs is a good brush fire so that new companies can flourish, same basic principle as farming, rotate your crops leave one place open and a good field fire can be good nourishment. let all these big dogs burn itll only sting for a while and sure enough youll se new companies sprouting up to take their place. At least that is the route i would go.

I wish this whole deal struck me as a really bad episode of The Three Stooges. However, it does not.

Where is the tipping point between being a brilliantly creative financier and an I’d do anything for the next buck huckster?

Is that balance point moving continuously, or is it clearly defined?

How is it that these men think and to whom are they accountable?

And is it too late to be afraid, very afraid?

Short of death, do we ever escape these fools who would be our undoing?

hey jimmyboy, get your own blog.

Don’t feel bad for Liddy, all he has to do to feel better is to go through automatic doors with his arm outstretched- he’ll feel like a Jedi >_<

He was unfairly smoked on the stand by a bunch of people who are doing their own sort of self-bonusing (politically speaking that is). The truth comes out over time and unfortunately when it does, the general public has moved on to the next sensational topic of the day. The guy should be given a break, or a public service citation.

I am self employed and I don’t get a bonus. But I understand performance incentives. The ones the Wall street and corporate boardroom guys have been giving each other, and I do mean EACH OTHER, over the past few years have been egregious, but the system in general works if it is used with wisdom and sound reasoning.

Bing, there’s too much mental energy pouring into the “here and now”. We need to starting thinking big, long term and out of the box about how we all live happily ever after. I think you’re the guy to lead us out…..

We’re experiencing the seed babble of all bubbles since Ronald Reagan occupied the white house.

Reagan served as the pied piper gathering the flock of self-aggrandizers that permeated throughout government, wall street, and corporate america.

It’s unbelieveable witnessing these nameless perpetraters scurrying for the bait and slinking back into their casba to gloat as the gypsies dance.

In this information age our world has been transformed into a gold fish bowl; there are no secrets as long as two or more people share an incognito event.

I could care less which greedy rich bastard gets a drubbing…and as for arguing which one deserves it more…..this is like arguing about which smells the worst; the eastern spotted skunk or the western striped. Hang’em all.

I went a bit far in my last comment; they deserve due process. We hang’em right after a fair trial.

WHERE IS THE MISSING BANK ????

Currently there are 20 banks that have failed since the new year, that’s averaging 2 a week,,,,according to my calander we should have 21 banks in the toilet…(allowing for a 3 day week at the start of January)

We only have 20,,,is someone holding back on the info…

How do they expect a person to mark the passing days,,when they cann’t make the banks fail on time.

A public drubbing is actually getting off pretty easy. These guys ruined lives just as surely as did the producers of tainted baby formula. Complete lack of concern about anything but themselves. It’s quite a stretch to feel sorry for any of them. One day, they’ll repent in a tell-all biography, and they’ll be lauded for their end of life humility.

Maybe fellow suits aspiring to similar success can empathize…I can’t. I must be lacking your epicurean tastes. I never admired them before their fall, and I sure as sh*t don’t now.

Bing…you better be enjoying some ice-shard filled martinis. It’s brutal out here without your moral support.

Mike, I thought I was being fantastically divisive by feeling sorry for Ed Liddy. Right now all everybody seems to want to do is expel poison gas into the atmosphere. Hang ‘em all! That’s fine. Except in the end only a few poor schlubs will get hosed and the rest will go on to run the next generation of scams. It’s exactly what’s happening in Cambodia right now, where large numbers of former Khmer Rouge murderers are now respectable government bureaucrats and in Eastern Europe, where the current governments are populated by hosts of former Stalinist apparatchiks. Tomorrow’s reformed financial power brokers will be reconstituted miscreant authors of our current situation. And history will remember only that a couple of losers took the dark road. Thank goodness, it will be written, that the vast majority of bankers, analysts, brokers and business reporters were excellent representatives of all that’s good in our capitalist system!

And you know what? All the people that everybody wants to kill? The vast, vast majority of them were just playing by the rules as they were laid down by every single bank, corporation and regulatory agency. You want to kill all those people? Or do we look at the system that made them rich? The rules just changed — quite literally last week. And now we have a mob that feels really good about itself and wants to kill anybody they can get their hands on. As long as you’re happy that the mob is going after the right people, I suppose we’re all in good shape. Sometimes I think that only the really big criminals have turned out to be truly honest about what they were doing. They were stealing. They knew it. The rest of the party were just, you know, following orders, and enjoying every minute of it.

Bing, I’m cool with that. I don’t want to see anybody killed (or even seriously inconvenienced). What I hate is anybody’s assumption of certainty. There’s enough blame for all of us.

O.M.G., it’s astonishing at how certain critics are lambasting the taking back of the chump change from the A.I.G. bonus recipients.

When the coal miners, steelworkers, farmers, auto workers, etc. get displaced, they get some pocket change to tide them over for a few months until the can find other employment—if they’re lucky.

As far as we know, these recipients still have a job. Are they so fragile that they can’t endure giving up some chump change?

The dollar is the same for everybody whether it be a garbage man, ditch digger, janitor, skilled or unskilled tradesman, doctor, attorney, engineer, soldier, drug pusher, or welfare recipient. Why would anybody think that the dollar is different for certain classes than others.

We’re all stewing in the same pot; Pain or pleasure is no different for any particular class or other.

When one reflects on Arlington National Cemetery, one might lament that their pain or pleasure is no more than a memory.

I need ice cream—wait a shot and a beer—wait the “Canadian Mist” will hide the problems of the world!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/1

AIG in a nutshell….an excellent read.

I agree with you, Bob. What’s interesting is the level of outrage at the bonuses compared with the level of outrage at all the poor people in this country losing their jobs, homes and medical care. Why do you suppose that is? I’m not saying the outrage at public money being used to line private pockets is wrong. It isn’t. But why is the mob waving their pitchforks at one end of the problem and essentially snoozing through the rest? The other thing that occurs to me is that the crisis is being portrayed as the result of the system gone wild, falling under the sway of a minority of its practitioners. This is the way Wall Street works. In fact, if you follow the market, with its hedge funds and shorts and fearful analysts and greedy operators, and all the rest of the barracuda, you will come to the conclusion that it is, at this very moment, still operating just that way.

Bing, most of us haven’t forgotten the homeless and unemployed and those that lost everything to this tragic event.

In fact you might say..that we blog for those that don’t even have a computor to blog with.

There is an old saying:
There except for the grace of God go I.

There is another old saying:

A man with a pitchfork in one hand and a torch in the other is either going to work early or about to set things straight.

Bing – I will tell you why the mob is angry and looking for a scapegoat. For several years we’ve been hearing about the outlandish bonuses and WS sobs making a killing. That was fine as long as the average Americans had their job and home. No longer true as we are losing homes and jobs –and yet these execs and WS sobs are still raking in all the while we the taxpayers are bailing their sorry asses out! So yes we’re pissed. And after reading Mike Spokane WA’s link, I am now looking for MANY scapegoats to be had – strip them of their personal wealth and send them to jail, the real penitentiary with murders, rapists, etc. And, our tax money should not pay for their food or clothes, but their families should finance it. They are to be released after catching thieves like themselves and proving it under the due process (X thieves per year for 10 years min) since our regulators are too stupid to do their job.

I agree with you, Kansas, and I get it. But who is “Wall Street”? Is it everybody who works in a public corporation? All executives who make over a certain amount a year, even if they’re not in a bailed out company? All guys in suits? Everybody who works south of 14th Street? I feel the way you do about the hedge funds, the people who view business as nothing more than a financial transaction between different groups of people with money. In fact, I feel that those who view businesses as nothing more than ways for shareholders to earn money are a huge part of the problem. So yeah, I walk around pissed off all the time at brokers, investment bankers, security analysts, all the parts of the machine that feed off the companies whose stocks are part of the market, and who are right now, in my opinion, destroying America with their fear, their greed, and their desire to continue making money on the work of other people. But I give a bit of a pass to people who work in corporations that have not taken a bailout, who are trying to get through this thing on their own, without government intervention, since, you know, a lot of them are my friends.

Bing, the difference is that we’re used to seeing poor people get screwed over…and there’s a tacit belief that somehow they deserve their fate…it must be due to some sort of personal flaw. If we find ourselves in that same predicament we are then looking in from the outside, marginalized.

The employee recipients of the bonuses are a group that’s always done well….everything’s always been tilted in their favor. To see one’s taxes used to bailout a mega-corporation is tough enough to swallow if we buy the ‘too big to fall’ argument. It’s blindingly infuriating if the bailout includes bonuses.

Most American’s don’t receive bonuses of any kind, and if they do they are often a rather small portion of their total compensation…and always at least marginally linked to the employers success. The idea of awarding substantial taxpayer funded bonuses to wealthy employees of a firm that has run itself into the ground is, to a rational person, simply insane. It just reinforces how seriously everything is tilted towards a favored few.

Why these bonus babies are drawing the wrath of informed constituents, from what I gather, is the insuring of C.D.O.s and swaps that they knew, or, should have known, were very risky at the very least. It seems that they turned a blind eye of apathy to risk.

By the same token, the individual looking for insurance must qualify with a physical and medical history with the possibility of a D.N.A. sample. Geeeze!

The banks have received billions of dollars from A.I.G. of tax payer money used to to bail this insurance giant out of reckless behavior.

Rodents feast on each other; this seems to be just another example of it, and a lack of the extermination process of pests.

Hard working responsible people have every to be pissed.

Bing,

You asked why all the outrage was directed at one end of the problem.

We want to believe that people who make more, much more, than average folk are somehow “better”; not just in the ability to earn but just better. It is a shattering of illusion when we are confronted with hard evidence that counters this desire.

Our society and media hold these poeple up as worthy of emulation neigh aspiration. When we find out they are not, our own landing
is abrupt, painful, and profounly dislocating. We feel a sense of loss akin to a death or divorce.

Just another tease. The garbage still stinks no matter how far you hoped you had removed yourself.

Have another drink. It is, once again, on you.

We know better than to believe but still we are strangely compelled.

The Obama administration is going to reveal its plan to buy up “toxic assets” tomorrow without first revealing the DNA of the “toxic assets” to the “Bank of Tax Payer America.

Isn’t the Bank of Tax Payer America afforded the same disclosure information that other financial instutions enjoy to see if their clients are “credit worthy”?

If we can solve our financial dilemma with “Turbo Tax”; why would we need Government with an army of MBAs’ to run the program when we can hire a minimum wage performer to do the in-puting?

Does automation only work to displace working people in the trenches so that the privileged can enjoy enormously more luxury?

I am somewhat surprised by the coments saying that a person who makes more is somehow seen as better or that there are even better people in general. i dont know about you but some of the best people in the world that give us things we simply cannot live without seem to make the least amount of money. i think the defect here is that the masses has been duped into thinking that some people are better than others. all that has really happened is they have been lied to by better liars, perhaps rather than let these people take our money we should make them all pro poker players and keep them away from the general work place. at least that way we can see who the biggest bullsh***er is and the best one still gets to be rich. just remember the whole of scociety is a cog without all of us doing our jobs the system collapses take away one piece and it simply doesnt work anymore.

in a society addicted to a quick stimulation of the senses and a veracious appetite for justice (revenge) all the mob is doing is pushing the needle into the vein so they can feel better about themselves tomorrow. but what happens when they wake up tomororw and realize nothing has really changed. we’ll just go after the next quick fix continuing the endless cycle of stupidity.

it’s almost unfathomable to me that, despite being in session an absurdly small amount of time during the year, congress feels the need to spend an entire day debating the 90% tax bill and grilling Mr. Liddy while writing a blank check for Mr. Obama and co.

we’re so concerned with kicking the chairs out from underneath these folks INSTEAD OF debating how we got into this mess and how we can get out and avoid it in the future.

Who are the WS mob you ask? For a starter, how about Madoff and Cassano? These greedy arrogant self-serving jerks did not know their own limitations or the consequences of their own actions. Second, Greenberg and his cronies who took what Cassano brought in — he stole money from investors and now robbing American taxpayers. Third, Morgan, Merrill & Goldman execs who were in bed with Cassano. These greedy mob should be stripped of their personal wealth and ego, and sent to jail. Glad Madoff is off to jail. Lastly, my definition of the WS mob also includes the SEC and other regulatory bodies as neither ignorance nor indifference justifies their inaction. They failed at their job, and yet took paychecks or tax payers’ money. SEC/OTS were in essence our/investors’ police officers hired to patrol the WS, but they were at Starbucks drinking coffee or sleeping all day while the greedy arrogant WS mob robbed our stores/homes. These are adults, and need to be held accountable. Were we not disciplined for our actions or inactions as a child? — In 2002, the Justice Department charged that AIGFP had illegally helped another firm, PNC Financial Services, to hide bad assets from its books. — In 2004, AIG settled the charges by paying an $80 million fine… (TMP) So, it is time to pick up a stick to their sorry asses. As we know, discipline without punishment becomes empty words. By the way Bing, choose your friend wisely, WS or not.

Isn’t Greenberg the guy who is suing AIG, and hence the Government, to wrest control of a multi-billion dollar pile of stock that Greenberg moved to a shell company which he used to dole out to people as bonuses?

In trying to understand how incentives prompt greed; incentives, in construction and manufacturing, drive people to the brink of exhaustion in not only trying to meet the deadline; but to beat the deadline to gain more bonus, plus!

By the same token, if “Bounty Hunters” were hired to contain the wackos that flip out into greed, would the “bounty hunters” also flip out into “greed” to collect as many notches on their guns as they can: no matter who the victims might be???

It’s a human problem caused by none other than “human greed”!

What really, really makes me chuckle is some guy who is apparently in the industry of taking shinola and rendering it into s**t who decries the intelligence of “the ‘average guy’ who wouldn’t know s**t from shinola in the industry.”