An
Insatiable Greed: Bonus Time! - $9.95
First they engaged in risky business practices - including insuring trillions in risky derivatives, then their meltdown helped trigger the global economic crisis, then they asked for and got hundreds of billions in taxpayer's money in a government bailout. So, what do they do next for a job well done? Why, it's Bonus Time, of course!
What can you do? Get mad, and then get this T-shirt from Neatorama's Online Store: http://shop.neatorama.com/store.php?economy-pg1-cid51.html
Other T-shirts about The Economy:
Stock
Market, The Ride |
The
$700 Billion Shirt |
Good
Marx, Bad Marx |
You could picture him alongside the bad one. I'd wear that t-shirt.
Credit default swaps are what is bringing down AIG, and they are the perfect example of pure "free market" ideology in practice: unregulated financial instruments.
The idea that just letting people fail means the debt will "disappear" is a fallacy. Somebody holds that debt, including people who thought they were making low-risk investments in reputable banks.
There is an idea here that virtuous companies are being punished while bad companies are being rewarded. When a financial bubble breaks it takes down good and bad alike.
The AIG bonuses stink, but people should take a deep breath and be rational about the situation.
If they just let all these worthless companies fail, new ones would spring up to take their place, all this bad debt would be written off and disappear, and a lot of people would learn valuable lessons. Instead we have created a huge incentive for companies to act irresponsibly. If you only fed your dog after he mauled neighborhood children, before long you would have a pretty mean dog. In reality, you should put the dog down after the first such incident.
Greed isn't what ruins nations, it's charity for the undeserving. AIG doesn't deserve your or my charity, and nor did Fannie, nor did Freddie, nor did any of the others. You can keep people from starving, but that doesn't mean that you should give companies welfare, or give them reason to breed more liabilities for the system.
Let the system work.
something's fishy.
follow the money...
not the paltry 200 mill, but the BILLIONS and BILLIONS AIG is sitting on or has 'laundered' ("bonuses" to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays... etc)
And their 'credit card limit' recently got upped ANOTHER $30 billion.
The employees certainly aren't angels... think of them more as flares and chaff.