It is fitting the AIG story broke during Sunlight Week. It makes your blood boil, but this is what transparency looks like:
The bonuses that the American International Group awarded last week were paid to 418 employees and included $33.6 million for 52 people who have left the failed insurance conglomerate, according to the office of the New York attorney general.
The company paid the bonuses, including more than $1 million each to 73 people, to almost all of the employees in the financial products unit responsible for creating the exotic derivatives that caused A.I.G.’s near collapse and started the government rescue to avoid a global financial crisis.
In a letter to Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wrote:
AIG now claims that it had no choice but to pay these sums because of the unalterable terms of the plan. However, had the federal government not bailed out AIG with billions in taxpayer funds, the firm likely would have gone bankrupt, and surely no payments would have been made out of the plan. My Office has reviewed the legal opinion that AIG obtained from its own counsel, and it is not at all clear that these lawyers even considered the argument that it is only by the grace of American taxpayers that members of Financial Products even have jobs, let alone a pool of retention bonus money. I hope the Committee will take up this issue at its hearing tomorrow.
And get this:
Furthermore, we know that AIG was able to bargain with its Financial Products employees since these employees have agreed to take salaries of $ I for 2009 in exchange for receiving their retention bonus packages. The fact that AIG engaged in this negotiation flies in the face of AIG’s assertion that it had no choice but to make these lavish multi-million dollar bonus payments. It appears that AIG had far more leverage than they now claim.
Three days ago, Dr. Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council, said “we can’t govern out of anger”:
We are a country of law. There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts. Every legal step possible to limit those bonuses is being taken by Secretary Geithner and by the Federal Reserve system.
The former Harvard president sounds like an educated fool. In the wake of populist outrage, Summers now says:
What the President’s made clear, what our Administration’s doing is being as creative as we can with a group of lawyers working on this problem, using recoupment authority, employing other means to do everything we can within the law to address this situation.
In the meantime, mark your calendar for April 3 and the national march on Wall Street.
Does anyone know where I can buy a pitchfork in Brooklyn?
