AIG Issues:The Biggest Corporate Loss In History & Bonus Outrage!

I'm sure that you've heard by now that AIG paid out $165 million in bonuses to the very same folks who brought the company down.We have bailed these people out 4 freakin' times!And they get to reward themselves for the ultimate failure! WTF?!!!

AIG better beef up their security because the anger towards them is more than palpable.There is also a lingering question that the Obama administration has to grapple with.How come they didn't know about these bonuses before they bailed AIG out for the umpteenth time? All contracts should have been looked at & renegotiated when Tim Geithner spoke to the CEO of AIG last week & gave them another $170 million!The auto industry had to jump through hoops for their bailout money!Why isn't that the case here?

Here's more on this sheer madness from Politico:

"AIG is turning out to be one of the White House's biggest headaches. Allowing it to fail would send catastrophic ripples through the economy – because AIG’s complex insurance contracts are intertwined with almost every financial player in the global economy.

It is truly “too big to fail” – because it’s failure would mean that banks that are relying on AIG to back up their bad investments would suddenly be on the hook themselves. That’s why when the company first showed signs of stress last fall, the Bush administration was quick to move in to shore it up, arguing that the collapse of AIG could spark a world-wide calamity.

But in many ways, it’s also one of the hardest bailouts for Obama to defend – since it was AIG’s insurance policies on exotic investments that freed up banks to make some of their riskiest bets, bets that went sour and touched off the global meltdown.

AIG reported this month that it had lost $61.7 billion for the fourth quarter of last year, the largest corporate loss in history.

Also adding to the political complications for Obama is a revelation Sunday that billions of American taxpayer dollars used to bailout AIG flowed to some of the largest foreign banks in the world. Some of the biggest recipients of AIG payouts were European banks, such as Societe Generale in France and Deutsche Bank of Germany, which got nearly $12 billion each.

In an interview aired Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said: "Of all the events and all of the things we've done in the last 18 months, the single one that makes me the angriest, that gives me the most angst, is the intervention with AIG."

"Here was a company that made all kinds of unconscionable bets," Bernanke said. "Then, when those bets went wrong, they had a-- we had a situation where the failure of that company would have brought down the financial system. ... I slammed the phone more than a few times on discussing AIG. ... I understand why the American people are angry."

Here is the president’s text:

Before I talk about the new steps we’re taking to get credit flowing to small businesses across our country, I want to comment on the news about executive bonuses at AIG.

This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed.

Under these circumstances, it’s hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay. How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?

In the last six months, AIG has received substantial sums from the US Treasury. I’ve asked Secretary Geithner to use that leverage and pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.

I know he’s working to resolve this matter with the new CEO, Edward Liddy, who came on board after the contracts that led to these bonuses were agreed to last year."(END OF EXCERPT)Read the article in its entirety here.