pruneau

Reaction to policy

March 20th, 2009 | Published in Point of View | 1 Comment

Why bailout AIG? Enough! The time has come to stop the nonsense.
I find it simply intolerable to continue to be an unvocal participant watching the current course of action regarding AIG.

This hedge fund, masquerading as an insurance company, is now under the majority ownership of the US government. And because our elected representatives decided to make me and everyone in America a shareholder of this unworthy company, they have the added responsibility to look out for our best shareholder interests.

With this new responsibility in their portfolio, it is now imperative that they immediately stop the payment of bonuses to quantitative analysts, derivative traders and managers who have essentially bankrupted this organization and facilitated the near demise of capitalism. It is simply senseless to reward any AIG employee for their performance in bringing America and the world to their knees with virtual economic collapse.

I further recommend that our elected representatives exercise their now significant financial leverage and cease any action that provides additional investment, bail out or capital infusion in this failed company. It is high time that we do what should have been done many months ago. Let AIG fail into bankruptcy and wipe out these toxic credit default swaps and the payouts that have now supposedly become America’s responsibility. These fraudulent instruments never had any value to begin with as they were conceived and sold with AIG’s full knowledge that they never had the financial resources to make good on these obligations should they ever be required to do so. So if they are fraudulent instruments, it is simply foolish to honor them as legitimate obligations and expect us to continue to pay for them with ever increasing amounts of borrowed money.

Systemic risk aside, I cannot see how shoveling money into this carcass can be in American taxpayers best interests. Nor do I have ANY confidence that we will ever see a reasonable return for the gargantuan investment that our elected officials have already chosen to make on our behalf.

So enough.
Put AIG in the grave, throw dirt on the coffin and let’s move on to applying our limited and diminished resources into activities that will actually deliver some real long term value for the shareholders of America.

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Jim Boyer says:

March 20th, 2009at 6:49 pm(#)

Amen, Washington and the Corporate world need a wake-up call. Like Pres. Obama said on Leno last night, these Corporate hooligans have to learn when enough is enough. When does greed cross the line into domestic terrorism? AIG and others are trying to bring down America, just like Osama bin Ladin. Send them to Gitmo.