^^ See above... he sold the section of the company he worked in and took a job with UBS... then grandstanded with that letter to the NYT where he never mentioned either of those things.

Also... look at what his previous job at UBS was... "Equity derivatives trading."

Cry me a river... that is why his letter was bullshit.

The big problem today is, ppl are so disenfranchised with wall street, they want to see ANYONE get punished associated with these firms, vs really thinking about a solution.

AIG will crumble for sure if they can't keep good people there. I don't necessarily take this guy at face value, but on the other end, you can tell people are just going for punitive measures and that means they're shifting focus away from a real solution.

If you were a highly competent person working at AIG, and you could easily get a job at other companies, would you continue working for AIG even if it meant politicians would try to fuck with your contract?

Obviously not - unless you're an idiot.

So, most of the people who can find well-paying jobs elsewhere will do so. The most talented and most promising employees will leave and seek greener pastures. Of course, they will get replaced. Largely by less competent people or people who haven't proven themselves yet.

How exactly will that help the company?

He got paid $1 in salary, and was given a contract promising a $1M bonus in March of 2009.

His job was to sell the part of the company he ran to another company, so that AIG could use the proceeds of that sale to pay the government back.

This guy is not the builder or the electrician, he's just the plumber, and the work he did for the company made them hundreds of millions of dollars and the expertise he has in his area, and the knowledge that he has about that division of the company, knowledge that nobody else has, not even another expert in his field, because he's the one who ran that actual division....that knowledge was necessary to complete the sale and that's why he got paid.

Not only that, but this guy is going to give all of the bonus money to charity and yet you people still want to burn him at the stake as "the bad guy who caused this whole mess"

All I have to say is thank god the founding fathers didn't put the House of Representatives in charge of everything with no checks and balances, or else we'd have already burned all of the banking and insurance CEO's in the country at the stake.

Not only that, but AIG as we know it won't exist very soon....they're selling off the company in pieces, and to do that you need people who know where all the bodies are buried. You can't sell the pieces without those people....it would take forensic accountants months and months and months to do the due diligence necessary for other companies to buy the pieces if the AIG employees who knew what was going on weren't there.
In the end that would cost the taxpayers alot more than it cost to just pay the bonuses and keep the people there.

Of course the mob is out and about with their pitch forks and ready to cut of their noses to spite their faces.

He did mention the sale to UBS but not his impending employment.

Anyone else find it interesting this man was VP of financial products and yet has never met the CEO? Mr Liddy took the helm Sept of last year but evidently doesn't meet with his top guys?

Always two sides to a story, even one as complex as this. I agree that this guy was in the "old boys" club with former AIG ballers and they all got paid.

Sorry, victim letter doesn't work for me pal.

He's a banker. Where else is he going to get a job if not at another bank. You shouldn't discount what he writes in the letter because of this. Namely that the CEO and the politicians knew of the bonus and didn't care about them up until recently.

It's not a victim letter, I highly doubt this guy is trying to make anyone feel sorry for him.

All he's saying, and I agree, is that if you ask the crew to stay onboard the Titanic so you can salvage the valuables before it goes under, taking the crew's lifeboat away at the last minute and telling them that they should drown because they were part of the reason the ship is sinking....is kind of a shitty thing to do.
Especially since the people you're taking the lifeboat away from were working in the engine room, not navigation. :2 cents:

True dat.

A U.S. House member never misses a chance to grandstand in front of the cameras, and this thing just grew legs so Obama and his people had to say/do something about it, while at the same time trying to calm the mob down.

This is the kind of story that boosts ratings and sells newspapers, so it's no surprise that the news organizations have been beating it to death to stoke the fire.

why do you guys have such a tough time wrapping your mind around the fact that its a company with almost 120,000 employees and god only knows how many independent divisions with countless VP's in each?

When he die, sure will go to heaven...

I also don't get why the people who want AIG employees to work for free, or for below market wages, ranted and raved about UAW workers having to take cuts in order for GM to get government help.

Like I said, I'm a liberal, but the populist hypocrisy has got to stop.

If you're pissed off about the government bailing out banks and AIG, then you also have to be pissed off about the programs that allow people who are behind on their house payments to avoid foreclosure.

You can't have it both ways.

I personally sympathize with him and what he said. First, the "problem" is one small division of a massive company and anyone that works for the whole company suddenly has AIDS.

Second... the "problem" isn't AIG and "AIG" wasn't the only one paying employees retention bonuses and all the other banks, VP's, CEO's etc slipped quietly under the radar because it wasn't politically convenient to attack them to direct attention away from everything else going on

Very true.

Sadly, we can't be sure that this is really the case.

As someone who has owned construction companies, I've seen many occasions where tradesmen cover each other's ass. They are more loyal to each other than to the owners.

We can't be sure the guys still there aren't trying to keep the mistakes and crimes hidden. In fact, the only smart thing is to assume they are.

The old workers should be court ordered and removed, and cleanup and investigative teams brought in.

And this helps the taxpayers and the economy how?

AIG needs to be broken down and sold....then the proceeds from the sale can be paid to the Treasury. Anything that delays or hinders that is just political theater or people wanting their pound of flesh....which might make some people feel better for about 2 minutes but won't do anything to get the taxpayers their money back or fix the economy moving forward.

Also, FWIW, the government doesn't have the authority to do what you're suggesting. The Obama administration has asked congress to give it that authority, but they don't currently have it.

Also, nobody at AIG did anything illegal. They did alot of stupid things but none of it was against the law. If it didn't pose systemic risk to the whole system, they'd just let it go bankrupt like any other business that made bad bets....but after what happened with Lehman, they decided an orderly wind down of the business was in everyone's best interest....but that doesn't mean they get to go in and tell people they're not getting paid or they're taking back money they made before or investigating people or shit like that.

That's ridiculous.

Snake Doctor, do you understand when your cat talks to you?

Hi there, I was wondering when you'd get home from school.

Are the street lights on yet?

executive vice president of the American International Group?s financial products unit

and he had no idea they were setting up for disaster?

or he didnt care as he was focused on getting his money

I read the letter and he makes some good points. Here is my opinion on this.

1. I have been in this guys situation (to some degree) in the past. I worked for a company that had several different divisions. The division I worked in was profitable and did well for the company. However two others were poorly ran and the sales team overestimated the amount of the units that would be sold. To meet the assumed demand the company ramped up production and hired a lot of people as well as purchasing the machines and tools these people needed to work. What came of it was a few warehouses full of product and no buyers. So the company spent a ton of money making a product they now were having trouble selling. That division along with another one drove the company into losses for the year. Twice a year they gave out bonuses and on this particular year they didn't because of the losses of those two divisions. No the bonuses were not guaranteed, but still everyone assumed we would get them and we were told by management that we would get them. Then we didn't

It happens. If the company fails you may get screwed. How many people who worked for Enron and had nothing to do with their downfall got fucked over? The ship was sinking and he decided to trust them and stay on and got the shaft.

2. If he wants to leave, let him leave. As someone else said this is a global company with around 120,000 employees. Does he assume that there is nobody else out there who can do his job? If the government hadn't stepped in with a bailout he would have been out of the job and no bonus because there would be no company. I understand him wanting to make a living, no problem, but tough times call for tough measures.

3. They should offer these people stock instead of bonuses. Sell the on the fact that the stock is at around $1, but just 2 years ago it was at around $70. Give them a ton of shares and tell them if they can just get it back up to $8-$10 they will be very rich. If they have that option ahead of them they may be willing to stay on work for next to nothing with the prospect of making a ton of money as the company rebounds.

We agree that AIG needs to be taken apart and resold.

An investigative takeover helps the taxpayers and the economy by giving one of the major things lacking in this situation - an objective picture of what happened and is happening.

I also agree that the government doesn't have the legal mechanism AT THIS TIME to do an investigative takeover.

However, thats simply a matter of legislative will. And it makes more sense than the idiotic show of taxing the bonuses 100%.

To get back to what I will say is my main point - what is most lacking, and most needed, is a objective picture of exactly what it is we bought when we handed out all this free money to the financial corporations.

How can we trust any of these institutions now?

I read the letter you posted, and my first response is, WHY should I believe a word of it? Or care, even if it's true?

AIG is huge, I get it. Many employees, I get it... global corporation, I get that too.

What I don't get is a VP of financial products division within the AIG family... the vice-president, second-in-command of that division has never even exchanged an email or a teleconference with his bosses, boss? or bosses, bosses, boss depending on their org structure? Liddy was put in power 6 months ago and they have never spoke?

This man wasn't a fucking mailboy in the basement somewhere.

It seems maybe this lack of communication was due to a high-level exec waiting out his time as he squeezed out a few more million before getting axed.

Here's an article from Matt Taibbi that sums up a perspective (my perspective certainly) on this Jake DeSantis' letter.

It's from alternet so the republican whiners should avert their eyes - it's too much for your girlish sensibilities.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture...t/?page=entire

Here's an excerpt with the salient points. Later in the article he busts down that idiotic plumber metaphor, so it might be worth your while to click the link just to read that.

================

Like a lot of people, I read Wednesday's New York Times editorial by former AIG Financial Products employee Jake DeSantis, whose resignation letter basically asks us all to reconsider our anger toward the poor overworked employees of his unit.
DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano's toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn't even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn't, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.

I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years, a very large part of that money coming from the sale of credit default protection. Doing the math, that averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.

Ask yourself this question: If your company made that much money, and the boss of the unit made almost $280 million in just a few years, exactly how likely is it that you wouldn't know where that money was coming from?

Are we supposed to believe that Jake DeSantis knew nothing about Joe Cassano's CDS deals? If your boss and the top guys in your firm were all making a killing selling anything at all -- whether it was rubber kayaks, generic Levitra or credit default swaps -- you really wouldn't bother to find out what that thing they were selling was? You'd really just mind your own business, sit at your cubicle and put your faith in the guys up top to fill you in if there was something you needed to know?

This would be a believable claim for an employee of some other wing of AIG, a company with well over 100,000 employees. But DeSantis works for tiny, 377-person AIGFP, a unit that had only two offices -- one in London and one in Greenwich, Conn.

And we're talking about financial professionals, the most shameless group of tirelessly envious gossips ever to walk the face of the earth. The likelihood that Cassano would pull in $280 million for himself, and his equally greedy, hopelessly jealous employees wouldn't know not only exactly how he made that money but every last ugly detail about his life -- from what skank he's sleeping with to what side of his trousers he hangs on -- is almost zero.

I know plenty of people who work in this world, and I've met very few who didn't hate with every cell in their bodies anyone in their own companies who made more money than they did or got bigger bonuses at Christmastime. Gossiping about each others' bonuses, and bitching about each others' compensation, is the national pastime for these people.

So forgive me if I don't buy this story that poor Jake and his buddies didn't know about Cassano's CDS business.

Also, there's this: let's just say, Jake, that you're telling the truth, that you don't know anything about this toxic portfolio. If that's the case, then why the fuck does anyone need to retain you at an exorbitant salary to help unwind that very portfolio? If these transactions aren't and never were your expertise, then where the hell is your value here?

When I spoke to Christine Pretto, the AIG spokeswoman, and asked about those bonuses, she said that AIG needed to retain people like you in order to take advantage of your "knowledge of these transactions." So if you don't have knowledge of these transactions, what are you being paid for? Your winning attitude?

Then there's the matter of Jake's other job offers. About that: It was apparent as early as last February that Cassano had basically destroyed not only the unit but perhaps AIG itself. The company announced over $11 billion in losses around that time.

If I'm Jake DeSantis, and I'm really innocent, I'm looking for a job that very instant. And I'm taking the first good job anyone offers me. Because by then I'd have realized that I was working for the latest version of Enron. That the man I've been working for the last six or seven years has turned out to be one of the most irresponsible Wall Street villains of all time, a man who single-handedly destroyed the 18th-largest company in the world. If I'm Jake DeSantis, I'm quitting out of moral disgust, because I don't want to be associated with this kind of behavior.

The only reason I'd stay is if I didn't have a choice. Which I feel sure is what happened here. If Jake DeSantis didn't take advantage of an opportunity to get a better job elsewhere with a company that didn't hide billions in losses and make $500 billion bets with money they didn't have, that's his fucking problem.

The notion that I the taxpayer have to pay this asshole a million-dollar bonus because he turned down a better job at a less-guilty company is repugnant to begin with; the notion that he stayed at AIGFP because he expected me to pay him this bonus makes me hate him even more.

But it's all moot, because I feel quite sure it's a lie. As one trader for another firm told me not long ago when I asked what he thought about the need to pay these "retention bonuses" to these "valued employees" at AIGFP:

"Yeah, right. Who would hire these guys? They'd stay for a dollar if you offered it to them, much less a million."

I mean, half of Wall Street is unemployed right now. There are plenty of unemployed traders out there whose resumes don't include such entries as "Worked for years at small unit of AIG that helped destroy the universe; throughout that time was completely ignorant of burgeoning global disaster unfolding 5 feet from my desk."


==============

good post

well said cuts thru the bullshit

I would have kept my million dollar bonus and my letter would have went like this..


Dear taxpayers....

Hahahahahaha. Ha. Haha. Ha. Thanks for the cash bitches...


- Jew cat

You can blame anyone you want for this, but the truth is at the end of the day all of us are to blame. If you bought, sold, or borrowed against a house in the past five years, your guilty.

It doesn't cut through anything, it's just more populist rhetoric that ignores the facts and reality of the situation and replaces them with "you should have known something was wrong and I think you're lying, and btw you're an asshole"

I could go through that letter point by point and show the egregious flaws in logic and twisting of the facts to suit the author's purpose, but that would be a total waste of my time because at the end of the day, most people want someone to be pissed off at, need to have someone to blame for all of this, and logic and reason apparently can't stand up to populist outrage these days.

I'm just happy that the guy in charge today is a cool headed person who is interested in facts and rational argument, not populist outrage.

You're right, the populist outrage of these guys getting taxpayers money in their sinking ship of a company is so uncalled for.

Once again, your extensive vocabulary and use of million dollar words can't save you Lenny..

Pay the bonuses and move on its the right thing to do :2 cents:

Yeah, that.

Reading that letter made me sad.

Welp I think this sums it up right here:

"None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house."

Heh... like all good scams - where are the people who started this boondoggle? Long gone from AIG I suppose... but where are they now?

No it was sending jobs overseas and wall st fucking leveraging 35 to 1. No one buys a house to lose it. It started before all this fell to shit. I was getting more and more girls who never worked in adult. Had real office jobs and were laid off and couldn't find other work that paid enough to cover their bills. And if you think this guy from AIG had to no clue to whats going on, your playing with yourself,he worked in their financial services diversion.The same diversion that help create this mess and he knew nothing? That's funny. What Im learning from all of this there isnt really right wing and or left wing media its all corporate media. Thats where everyone gets its all our fault and they hear so many times they believe it. Do the math 500 billion would buy up all the bad loans in this country and they have spent how many trillions to date? It was 35 to 1 leveraging, they know this and dont want to give the true number to the american people because they would shit themselves.

The guy said he was raised by schoolteachers, and went to MIT on scholarship, so I don't think he was belittling teachers and nurses or anything.

That alternet article had some good points on the overall issue, but what person A is responsible in a 377 person company and what person B is responsible for are pretty different. If the point is that it is wrong to feel sympathy for anyone who has ever done better than oneself financially, that kinda seems like spitting on the American dream, given that this particular AIG guy claims to have pulled himself up by his bootstraps and nobody seems to be disputing his backstory.

Dont you understand these scumbags almost collapsed the financial industry? How about all the people that dont have millions who got laid off or lost everything because of these guys actions.

In big business, although it may be nice to have a card which says VP, there are generally many vice presidents, so no specific one is likely to be second in command. From what those articles say the division called "financial products" did not handle the products which nearly sank (and probably should have sunk) the company.

It is like people who do not work in online adult do not understand what someone who is primarily an affiliate means when they say they do not run "sites". Yes, of course they have sites by the definition of the word, but industry people know they mean they do not have membership sites. Yes, of course insuring banks for their poorly-considered loans might be considered a financial service, but that is clearly not what people in that industry mean by it.

I think the point of that op ed to the NYT is that the scumbags who almost collapsed the specific financial industry are escaping in their gold parachutes and leaving non-scumbags taking the blame for others' misdeeds.

Yeah he made millions,mit grad but had no idea what was going on.