That's not what he's saying at all. He's saying, like I did on the first page, that the 0.1% bailout that goes to bonuses is much less offensive than the whole thing or the 30% or so that goes straight to foreign banks.
By the way, all those 165M is already paid. Some of the receipts are non-US nationals residing in London. So some of that 165M will not be recouped for sure.
Sam, forgot to ask... where did you get this info? I can't seem to find it. Also, what is the difference between AIGFP and AIG Investments? They sound the same, but they have different CEOs.
It is in Cuomo's letter yesterday: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/media_center/2009/mar/House Committee Letter 3.17.09.pdf AIGFP was the credit default swap trading unit run by Cassano based in UK and CT, mostly. They were operating as an outlaw insurer writing all these derivative bets. AIG Alternative Investments is based in NYC, on park avenue I think - they ran a smorgasbord of different investment businesses in which they (badly) invested AIG"s free cash, such as their own private equity fund, their own hedge fund, etc. Edit: sorry, AIG Investments is the parent of AIG Alternative Investments. AIG Investments basically operated as a mini investment bank to play with AIG's free cash.
I got off from work early to enjoy the sunshine and managed to watch some of Liddy getting grilled. Supposedly he did well, but the wrath was on. I loved the "I can't believe it's not butter/insurance reference"...
I thought Liddy did very well. Each congressman basically asked him the same questions. They all had to get their licks in…. He was calm cool and collected throughout. Ironically, he’s not even the one that should have been getting “grilled” anyway. He was parachute dropped into all of this nonsense after the fact. Now he’s trying to right the ship and he’s got a bunch of bimbos in pink shirts with signs saying he needs to go to jail? These idiots probably can’t even name AIG’s previous 3 CEOs, much less figure out that everything happened under their watch, not Liddys. SamFisher, Liddy seemed to imply that – without naming names – the employees in FP that were paid these bonuses were NOT the same employees that did all the CDS damage in the first place. He also said the ones that left the company only left because they were finished unwinding their assigned portfolio(s) and thus had earned their retention bonuses. I don’t know who to believe. What do you think?
I don't really know - it's possible that AIGFP had its hands in other pots, AIG hasn't exactly been forthcoming about who did what. But from what I've read and heard, trading credit derivatives was the whole reason for the group's existance. See article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28melt.html?_r=1 But does that mean only Cassano and handful few others were responsible for writing 2 trillion worth of bad derivatives? Sounds kind of far-fetched to me.
