AIG paid out $454 million in bonuses in 2008 not the $120 million previously reported. AIG certainly has a lot of nerve after taking $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22134.html
the problem is we rarely persecute such companies and their leaders as being true criminals. Once we do, I think you will see that this problem will quickly go away. I dont mean give them a light sentence where they are confined to the waldorf astoria for 3 years lol.
Truth be told, reality today is if you want an upper management job, you will likely have to participate in quasi criminal activities to be competitive. One example of many is the entire lobbyist industry and the whole pay for helpful legislation process. Its not illegal per the letter of the law, but it is rank and file corruption at the end of the day and 95% of Washington and big business are participants.One of the big reasons legislation punishing any of this nonsense is likely to be coming forward anytime soon.
There was a lot of outrage when AIG announced that they were giving out $120 million in bonsuses. American International Group Inc. has set aside and paid in part nearly $1.5 billion in retention and performance-related bonuses to its employees, a higher amount than previously disclosed. The payments, $1 billion for retention purposes and more than $454 million that are performance-related, have been made as AIG received more than $180 billion from the federal government. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iDppam4f0E6PL_f4m3gUnsvNNcmQD98116701
Amazing. That article said performance bonuses looooooool. I wish I could get a performance bonus for running my company into the ground and losing an unbelievable amount of money for the year. This is unreal.
AIG was an indirect bank bailout. I beleive that Gooldman got something like $34 billion from payments on credit default swaps.