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Hi
Here's an interesting article for my friends in the US from our Brisbane daily newspaper The Courier-Mail under the title of "Not just obscene, it's absurd." I might add that this madness is happening in Oz as well.
Quote:
The frenzy over the AIG and other executive bonus payouts in the US is disturbing less for the sheer stupidity of it all but much more for what it says about the developing mindset.
Now of course these AIG bonuses - or most of them - should not have been paid. It is not just obscene but absurd for a company that's basically gone broke, to be paying bonuses.
Does the word still have any meaning? You are supposed to pay and receive a bonus for SUCCESS. Further, to describe AIG as "going broke" is a massive understatement of just how comprehensively disastrous it was and is.
The sheer stupidity of it is captured by asking the simple question: WHY were the bonuses paid in the first place? Because they were specifically authorised by President Obama's boy genius Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and by the very politicians who are now venting loudest and longest, the Democratic leadership in Congress. This in itself is a sobering instruction of the dangers you face when you have politicians trying to micro-manage business activity.
The "solution" the congress that approved the bonuses has now come up with to attack them is mind-bogglingly stupid. Making the very healthy assumption that it is constitutional. To tax them at 90 - 100 per cent, or perhaps even more. But not just the AIG bonuses but ALL bonuses paid by companies getting bailout money.
Does the Obama Administration want the bailouts to work or fail? Forget about the specific banks and companies themselves, their executives and boards of directors; I'm talking about work to avoid a replay of the Great Depression.
This would have to be the mother of all "spite yourselves". Damaging the bailouts purely so you can grandstand on bonuses which are trifling in the bigger scheme of things.
There's an even more specific stupidity. The US Government and taxpayers now have investments adding to hundreds of billions of dollars in AIG and other companies. The attack not just on AIG bonuses, but specifically any and ALL bonuses paid by companies getting bailout money is an attack on your own investment.
Bad enough as all that is, the bigger worry is the growing sense of people wanting the US to pull up the drawbridge, so to speak.
Running parallel with the bonus indignation is outrage at much of the bailout money given to AIG flowing on to other financial institutions. Including, gasp gasp, to NON-AMERICAN ONES! OUR money actually going to FOREIGNERS!
Unquote.
It's early days for the Obama Administration, but hello...
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