Well here's an article about "How AIG became too big to fail"
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2 comments:
I'm kind of mad at AIG about this. SO much money was given to that company, and they went behind the government's back and gave that money to its employees. I understand that AIG is too important to fail because they deal with a lot of business worldwide, especially insurance, and if they crash and burn, it will affect the whole economy negatively. The bailout was necessary, but their use of the money is completely horrible. They are paying their executives a total of $165 million dollars, which is a ridiculous amount of money, and I can't believe that the Treasury's lawyers will not break those contracts. Really, nobody really needs million-dollar bonuses. What really angers me is that the government, in order to keep the economy afloat, kind of has to make sure that AIG is financially okay, but, as it turns out, we can't trust them with the bailout money. Unfortunately, we can't take that money away.
I was listening to the news at some point this evening, and they announced that Congress had just passed a bill taxing 90% of all bonuses given to individuals who make more than $200,000 a year and whose employers received money through the government bailout. This sounded like a direct result of that recent scandal, where it turns out AIG gave some of its wealthier employees huge bonuses after getting federal money. After the press got word, they were being pressured into giving at least half of it back to the companies, the reasoning being that if these companies truly were on the edge of bankruptcy, of desperation, they would do something more meaningful with it than just hand it out at work. When I heard AIG was engaging in these hand-outs, I was appalled mostly becuase the people who were getting this money were the ones least fatally affected by the recession. Families have been thrown out of their homes, unemployment has skyrocketed and these big wall-street players have probably lost money on Wall Street, true, but they are still pulling down mid to high six figures annually. If AIG and the other "too big to fail" companies really wanted to give their newfound money away, try finding people who really need it; those employees had better give back every penny of those bonuses too.
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