Less than a week after the federal government offered an $85 billion bailout to insurance giant AIG, the company held a week-long retreat for its executives at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., running up a tab of $440,000, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said today at the the opening of a House committee hearing about the near-failure of the insurance giant.
Showing a photograph of the resort, Waxman said the executives spent $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 for the spa.
“Less than a week after the taxpayers rescued AIG, company executives could be found wining and dining at one of the most exclusive resorts in the nation,” Waxman said. “We will ask whether any of this makes sense. ”
What on earth were they thinking? Makes the heart sick–read it all.
What’s the mystery? If you give people other people’s money, they’ll spend it less prudently than if they were spending their own. The AIG executives violated their trust and the response has been to hand them 85 billion dollars. I’d be partying too.
Five’ll getcha ten that the word most frequently uttered at the resort was “suckers,” most likely with great enthusiasm.
Publish their individual names and addresses and let nature take it’s course.
On of the comments following the article read in past: “American tax payers are [the] new sucker in town.”
New??
That should have been, “in part.”
The Insurance Mafiosos at play! Are RICO charges possible here?
I doubt that publishing their names would lead to any shame or repentance – there’s always someone in the free market who wants to make a big, fast buck, maybe even at the expense of the great unwashed, and the AIG executives will be more than willing to hire themselves out to the highest bidder. Unless they end up in jail first. Even then they may prosper.
the bailout should come with an overseer to check againt these silly sort of expenditures.
[blockquote]The Insurance Mafiosos at play! Are RICO charges possible here? [/blockquote]
If there’s a racket being run and influenced by a corrupt organization, it’s the cretins that bailed out AIG.
And all the ACLU types have been in such a frenzy to remove the 10 Commandments from classrooms and public buildings. A good dose of “Thou shalt not steal”, properly applied, might have gone a long way towards preventing this obscenity.
Investors desperate for a safe place to put their money give $440,000 to the U.S. Government in exchange for Treasury securities. The U.S. Government gives the $440,000 to AIG. AIG gives it to St. Regis Resort. St. Regis Resort pays its employees, reimburses its suppliers, and pays off some of its debt. The employees get to stay employed, the suppliers get to stay in business, and the holders of the Resort’s debt get to lend the money to somebody else. Sounds OK to me.
Envy is a sin.
Looks like these capitalists knew the great secret about capitalism. The government always has to bail you out.
They were thinking that they were better than the rest of us, more deserving, more troubled, more… Just more. Because they were captains of industry – the people to whom the Airlines are actually polite, because they deserve it, of course.
Not like those elitists who understood poetry in High School, who speak in grammatically-parseable sentences when questioned by the baying hounds of the news media -fair-n-balanced(tm) or not – …
They’re the bosses, that’s why. Sometimes my grange-socialist grampaw rises up in my blood and somehow “it makes the heart sick” seems like weasel-words to me.
May God have mercy on us all.
No, Chazaq! It’s not a sin when you’ve caught someone living it up on stolen money! Money stolen from us taxpayers because the government used it to bail these crooks out! The bums who ran AIG belong in prison for what they did.
And I don’t mean in a “resort” prison!
11, and to post nothing is to eleveate secularism over all religions. Eather way you can’t avoid promoting a worldview. The only question is which worldview are you going to promote.
RE: “. . . .there’s always someone in the free market who wants to make a big, fast buck, maybe even at the expense of the great unwashed. . . ”
And now it seems that it’s so when one is not in the free market, as well.
Nice to see that one can make good money on the government dime as well.
Somebody’s going to make money — the only question is who decides who will make the money. In the financial sector, it is now the government who will dole it out.
What a travesty.
Chazaq,
That is specious reasoning. One could use the same argument for welfare, or the Iraq war or, if you prefer, the air campaign against Serbia. What is not seen is what the market would have decided was the best use for that money had not Treasury debt and the assurance of taxation backed by nuclear weapons sucked that source of capital out of the private sector.
Now, corporate greed is nothing new. But I work for a large insurer as well and our top executives stay at the Marriott Inn and rent out a conference room. Insurers that lavish executives and make poor investment decisions go out of business. This creates opportunity for more prudent insurers, and business professors write up AIG’s case history and tell it to the next generation of executives. This evolutionary process is thwarted by the government propping up a business model that the market had already passed a sentence of death upon.
#19
Well said. I think Sarah and Jeffersonian would agree as well.
I seem to remember an old Ferengi Rule of Acquistion from Star Trek years ago. “No matter how bad things get, someone somewhere is making money.” And obviously spending it as well.
The Feds now own a majority of AIG. As a tax payer and therefor by extension a stockholder in AIG, I would like to see the CEO fired for this as an object lesson to all others that we are tired of this frivolous attitude towards huge sums of other people’s money.
Just my 2 cents… (I’d offer more but I had a lot in the stock market.)
ICXC
John
The ownership of public companies has become so diffuse and attenuated that it is increasingly hard to hold management to account.