Posted: 3/17/2009 6:20:23 PM EDT
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I was wondering what you all think.
I say, although it sucks, it was a contract and binding. I personally think that if the govt. gets involved in cancelling contracts then we have lost the whole meaning of the free market and binding contracts. The govt. screwed it up to begin with with Barney and the gang and they need to be held accountable. They start cancelling contracts from oversight, then what makes us think they will start cancelling parts of the Constitution in some shape or form. Your thoughts? |
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Quoted:
I was wondering what you all think. I say, although it sucks, it was a contract and binding. I personally think that if the govt. gets involved in cancelling contracts then we have lost the whole meaning of the free market and binding contracts. The govt. screwed it up to begin with with Barney and the gang and they need to be held accountable. They start cancelling contracts from oversight, then what makes us think they will start cancelling parts of the Constitution in some shape or form. Your thoughts? I agree with you. Not only that, but they wrote into the bail out that bonuses would be protected. We have a bunch of liars and hypocrites in DC. |
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Part of the terms of the government mandated money should have been the cancellation of all 'bonuses.' I am not busting my balls so Johnny Insurance Manager can buy a new yacht after fucking up.
Shit, I get $500-$700 for a bonus if I complete about $60 million in construction work on time and under budget in a year. Somebody explain to me how the fuck I can get a cool million for helping to sink the largest insruance company in the nation and I'll be the first in line to sign up. |
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Pure diversion. The Feds are counting on people to be jealous of "dem richified folk and dere unfair bonuses!!!" to distract them from the truly horrifying "reconstruction" of our economic system. +1 Playing the class warfare card in regards to a situation THEY created. Just another tool to help in their socialist endeavors. If the bonus money is taken back in any form it will set a very bad precedent for the future. |
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Pure diversion. The Feds are counting on people to be jealous of "dem richified folk and dere unfair bonuses!!!" to distract them from the truly horrifying "reconstruction" of our economic system. +1 Playing the class warfare card in regards to a situation THEY created. Just another tool to help in their socialist endeavors. If the bonus money is taken back in any form it will set a very bad precedent for the future. +1 As much as I hate to see them get a cent, this is all still just diversion. |
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Considering it was Barney Frank, Andrew Cuomo et al. that pushed the whole idea of giving mortgages to folks who couldn't afford it in the first place... I find it disturbingly painful to watch them now complain that its not fair. No, whats not fucking fair is the fact that no one has a memory longer than 30 mintues to recall how Government got US into this mess to begin with! Hypocrites. http://taxdayteaparty.com/ <–––––––––––––––– BE THERE. |
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If you don't put strings or conditions on the money you lend people, it's your own damn fault. "We just gave a sack of money to that crackhead...and he had the gall to go spend it all on crack!!" No shit. If you don't want that result, when you hand over the sack of money, you say: "You can't buy crack with this." Duh. |
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Good for them. Flame away..... We are so fucked anyway. Whats another couple hunderd million. +1 It's less that 1% of the total AIG got in the bailout. Yes, it sucks for the taxpayers, but that money and a whole lot more will never make it back into our pockets. The way I understood it was that these were retention bonuses, and they were written into the bailout so the fuck sticks who created all the smoke and mirror financial derivatives would be retained to help undo some of that crap...or at least figure out to to stop or prevent further collapse. Obamama and his lackeys demanding that the bonuses be forfeited, is a joke and a ploy to get the common folk pissed off. If the bonuses are canceled, these guys and their intellectual capital walks out the door leaving the door open to further chaos when it is realized that what happened in October was only the tip of the iceberg and they have no one around who understands how everything was patched together. And yes, we are fucked whether these guys get their bonuses or not..... |
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This is the weekly diversion… Attacks Limbaugh and Cramer have run their course we need a new enemy to be outraged about.
Obama has a $3.55 Trillion dollar budget proposal plus probably $1.5 billion or more in bailout and other off budget spending… So we are told Obama is outraged by these AGI bonuses, bonuses he knew about before they were issued, yea right. |
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Which elected officials received the most money from AIG towards their campaign?
1. Chris Dodd 2. Barack Hussien Obama Go figure. The government should have checked the fine print before handing out money!
As stated earlier, the government put the bonus guarantee in the first bail-out. The hypocrites already knew. |
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Quoted:
I was wondering what you all think. I say, although it sucks, it was a contract and binding. I personally think that if the govt. gets involved in cancelling contracts then we have lost the whole meaning of the free market and binding contracts. The govt. screwed it up to begin with with Barney and the gang and they need to be held accountable. They start cancelling contracts from oversight, then what makes us think they will start cancelling parts of the Constitution in some shape or form. Your thoughts? The media omits details like contractual obligations. |
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Part of the terms of the government mandated money should have been the cancellation of all 'bonuses.' I am not busting my balls so Johnny Insurance Manager can buy a new yacht after fucking up. Shit, I get $500-$700 for a bonus if I complete about $60 million in construction work on time and under budget in a year. Somebody explain to me how the fuck I can get a cool million for helping to sink the largest insruance company in the nation and I'll be the first in line to sign up. They can't cancel contracted agreements. |
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they signed the contracts before the bailout's so they should get it. this is still (i think) a free market system. the government saying they're gonna tax the bonuses 100%. there's no way in hell they should be able to do that. that's beyond communism. obama and others getting campaign contributions from aig. they should have to pay it back out of their pockets. well just obama. 
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The .gov fucked us all when they started handing out OUR money... they should have let "Free Market" principles dictate their business. If they can't pay their wages & their contracts, then they go Bankrupt. Simple as that. If I can't pay on my vehicle loan (Contract) and I default.. guess what. I lose my vehicle. The .gov doesn't come pay my payment with everyone elses money. Oure shit plain and simple. 
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Just another shakedown:
The Looting of America's Coffers NY Times By DAVID LEONHARDT Published: March 10, 2009 Sixteen years ago, two economists published a research paper with a delightfully simple title: "Looting." The economists were George Akerlof, who would later win a Nobel Prize, and Paul Romer, the renowned expert on economic growth. In the paper, they argued that several financial crises in the 1980s, like the Texas real estate bust, had been the result of private investors taking advantage of the government. The investors had borrowed huge amounts of money, made big profits when times were good and then left the government holding the bag for their eventual (and predictable) losses. In a word, the investors looted. Someone trying to make an honest profit, Professors Akerlof and Romer said, would have operated in a completely different manner. The investors displayed a "total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending," failing to verify standard information about their borrowers or, in some cases, even to ask for that information. The investors "acted as if future losses were somebody else's problem," the economists wrote. "They were right." On Tuesday morning in Washington, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave a speech that read like a sad coda to the "Looting" paper. Because the government is unwilling to let big, interconnected financial firms fail - and because people at those firms knew it - they engaged in what Mr. Bernanke called "excessive risk-taking." To prevent such problems in the future, he called for tougher regulation. Now, it would have been nice if the Fed had shown some of this regulatory zeal before the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But that day has passed. So people are rightly starting to think about building a new, less vulnerable financial system. And "Looting" provides a really useful framework. The paper's message is that the promise of government bailouts isn't merely one aspect of the problem. It is the core problem. Promised bailouts mean that anyone lending money to Wall Street - ranging from small-time savers like you and me to the Chinese government - doesn't have to worry about losing that money. The United States Treasury (which, in the end, is also you and me) will cover the losses. In fact, it has to cover the losses, to prevent a cascade of worldwide losses and panic that would make today's crisis look tame. But the knowledge among lenders that their money will ultimately be returned, no matter what, clearly brings a terrible downside. It keeps the lenders from asking tough questions about how their money is being used. Looters - savings and loans and Texas developers in the 1980s; the American International Group, Citigroup, Fannie Mae and the rest in this decade - can then act as if their future losses are indeed somebody else's problem. Do you remember the mea culpa that Alan Greenspan, Mr. Bernanke's predecessor, delivered on Capitol Hill last fall? He said that he was "in a state of shocked disbelief" that "the self-interest" of Wall Street bankers hadn't prevented this mess. He shouldn't have been. The looting theory explains why his laissez-faire theory didn't hold up. The bankers were acting in their self-interest, after all. * The term that's used to describe this general problem, of course, is moral hazard. When people are protected from the consequences of risky behavior, they behave in a pretty risky fashion. Bankers can make long-shot investments, knowing that they will keep the profits if they succeed, while the taxpayers will cover the losses. This form of moral hazard - when profits are privatized and losses are socialized - certainly played a role in creating the current mess. But when I spoke with Mr. Romer on Tuesday, he was careful to make a distinction between classic moral hazard and looting. It's an important distinction. With moral hazard, bankers are making real wagers. If those wagers pay off, the government has no role in the transaction. With looting, the government's involvement is crucial to the whole enterprise. Think about the so-called liars' loans from recent years: like those Texas real estate loans from the 1980s, they never had a chance of paying off. Sure, they would deliver big profits for a while, so long as the bubble kept inflating. But when they inevitably imploded, the losses would overwhelm the gains. As Gretchen Morgenson has reported, Merrill Lynch's losses from the last two years wiped out its profits from the previous decade. What happened? Banks borrowed money from lenders around the world. The bankers then kept a big chunk of that money for themselves, calling it "management fees" or "performance bonuses." Once the investments were exposed as hopeless, the lenders - ordinary savers, foreign countries, other banks, you name it - were repaid with government bailouts. In effect, the bankers had siphoned off this bailout money in advance, years before the government had spent it. I understand this chain of events sounds a bit like a conspiracy. And in some cases, it surely was. Some A.I.G. employees, to take one example, had to have understood what their credit derivative division in London was doing. But more innocent optimism probably played a role, too. The human mind has a tremendous ability to rationalize, and the possibility of making millions of dollars invites some hard-core rationalization. Either way, the bottom line is the same: given an incentive to loot, Wall Street did so. "If you think of the financial system as a whole," Mr. Romer said, "it actually has an incentive to trigger the rare occasions in which tens or hundreds of billions of dollars come flowing out of the Treasury." Unfortunately, we can't very well stop the flow of that money now. The bankers have already walked away with their profits (though many more of them deserve a subpoena to a Congressional hearing room). Allowing A.I.G. to collapse, out of spite, could cause a financial shock bigger than the one that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Modern economies can't function without credit, which means the financial system needs to be bailed out. But the future also requires the kind of overhaul that Mr. Bernanke has begun to sketch out. Firms will have to be monitored much more seriously than they were during the Greenspan era. They can't be allowed to shop around for the regulatory agency that least understands what they're doing. The biggest Wall Street paydays should be held in escrow until it's clear they weren't based on fictional profits. Above all, as Mr. Romer says, the federal government needs the power and the will to take over a firm as soon as its potential losses exceed its assets. Anything short of that is an invitation to loot. Mr. Bernanke actually took a step in this direction on Tuesday. He said the government "needs improved tools to allow the orderly resolution of a systemically important nonbank financial firm." In layman's terms, he was asking for a clearer legal path to nationalization. At a time like this, when trust in financial markets is so scant, it may be hard to imagine that looting will ever be a problem again. But it will be. If we don't get rid of the incentive to loot, the only question is what form the next round of looting will take. Mr. Akerlof and Mr. Romer finished writing their paper in the early 1990s, when the economy was still suffering a hangover from the excesses of the 1980s. But Mr. Akerlof told Mr. Romer - a skeptical Mr. Romer, as he acknowledged with a laugh on Tuesday - that the next candidate for looting already seemed to be taking shape. It was an obscure little market called credit derivatives. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/business/economy/11leonhardt.html?_r=4 &adxnnl=1&ref=business&adxnnlx=1236776413-jwYbCsymsSunlApzS4FWGg Full history here |
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Obama and his flunkies knew about this - All this is is Grandstanding from those assholes. Geithner was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of NY before this stint:
Washington Post Article In short - Attorneys working for the Fed had been examining the matter for months and determined that the retention payments couldn't be touched because AIG would face costly lawsuits and be subject to penalties from states and foreign governments. Administration officials said over the weekend that they agreed with that assessment. Beginning in the first quarter of 2008, AIG disclosed the plan to offer retention awards at Financial Products. The unit had already begun to hemorrhage money, a problem that would later grow exponentially. The unit's executives, fearing they might lose valuable employees in the tumultuous months to come, successfully negotiated more than $400 million for their workers, to be paid this month and again next year. At the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which has directly overseen AIG since its federal takeover in September, officials have studied the possibility of rescinding or delaying the bonuses. They even brought in outside lawyers for advice. The conclusion: If the bonuses weren't paid, the AIG staffers would be able to sue the company and probably would win, not just what they were owed but also punitive damages that would make the ultimate cost perhaps two to three times as high as the bonuses themselves Besides where's the outrage on the Million Dollar plus bonuses Franklin Rains got based on the falsifications of the books for Freddy Mac & Fanny Mae ? Nobody's asked him to pay those bonuses back, or taxed him out the be jesus. Why???? Cause he's Obama's Boy. Chuck Schumer - <due to the coc, I can't put what I want> you commmunist blood sucking pig bastard. |
Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa didn't appear to be joking, however, when he spoke with Cedar Rapids, Iowa, radio station WMT. "I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little better toward them [AIG executives] is if they follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, 'I am sorry,' and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide," he said. "And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide." |