and we’ve heard that several thousand people are supposed to get bonuses so how can it only be the people who screwed up?

liddy (and probably the entire managment team) should be fired. but that doesn’t mean every single grunt in the company is likewise as dishonest or incompetent. and it’s not the fault of the grunts in the organization that the management is so completely fucked up.

we just don’t have enough info yet to judge more than the management. which brings us back to the need for a really good investigation… and if there hasn’t been one that is again the fault of management and not the grunts.

I’m not saying it works but that was what the idea was. The Fed tried to stimulate lending by cutting short term rates to zero. That didn’t work so now it is trying to affect longer term rates by nudging longer term T bill rates down. I don’t see this working either but the idea is to lower long term rates and cause more money to go into lending.

i’ve been googling around and nowhere have i seen the fed or anyone else make that claim – that the fed purchase of treasuries is meant to free up credit or that lower long term rates cause more money to go into lending. (i get the short term rate argument. that’s a separate issue). can you give me a link? an explanation would be great, but at this point i’d take anything showing that freeing up credit was actually what the fed is trying to do by purchasing treasuries.

again, i’m not questioning the point about whether whatever the fed is trying to accomplish will actually work. that is a completely separate question.

I’m inclined to turn AIG over to Jane, Christy & Marcie. At least we’d know that taxpayers wouldn’t be stolen blind for their own personal enrichment. Cold comfort after trillions have been dumped into Wall Street’s pockets since mid-2007 when the grand unraveling became obvious to those who were paying attention.

The problem of these bonuses is not going away.

Completely agree.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we discovered there were some Bushie holdovers at Treasury who got the message, but didn’t tell Geithner or some staffers at the WH who just didn’t know what they were doing when they told Dodd to cut the limits on compensation? Yeah, I know, not likely. But then, it’s not been shown yet that what happened was in fact bad or wrong.

It just seems outrageous that we should have to pay people to clean up this mess.

Geithner’s background really needs the sunshine poured on it. He worked a couple of years in the Kissinger law firm – hmmm, on whose recommendation was he hired there? Geithner was head of NY Fed Reserve when a lot of the ponzi schemes were high-rollin.

There sure are a lot of Obama’s economic team on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), as well as others in his cabinet. Call themselves Dems, huh?

Going to see if I can find out more about Jim Webb’s statement about the bail-out mess.

Reducing AIGFP to those two points assumes that this isn’t another Enron scenario on a global scale. AIG’s perverse incentive system didn’t make this crisis possible, it made it inevitable. And their exit strategy? A deep pocket cannibalism of the coming $20 trillion U.S. federal debt.

Extorting billions with someone else left on the hook for the debt service, never mind the cost of eventually reducing that balance in the face of all of our other long term needs is fraud.

And as for the sanctity of contracts, the Godfather’s business was built on contracts.