A. I. G. AKA Aloof Incompetent Geezers

We tax payers gave 180 billion bucks to A.I.G. Then they spent 170 million bucks on bonuses for in house incompetent bozos. The reality here is that’s a drop in the bucket compared to A.I.G.’s real misdeeds. I mean what is that .11 percent, .011 percent? I don’t know, my calculator doesn’t go that high. No matter, it’s a pittance against the real A.G.I. theft of tax payer money. Therefore we can multiply our outrage by a factor of ten after considering all A.I.G.’s blatant theft of our money.
In September of 2008 A.I.G. received 85 billion in the first round of bail-outs. That’s in Bush time;then 65 more billion in Bush time and finally 30 billion more in Obama time.
The reality in that A.I.G. had obligations in the form of payment for loses to financial institutions. A.I.G. either owned or insured most of the crap real-estate loans. Instead of defaulting on the contracts they were in with other banks they paid full price on devalued assets. Okay, so what. This means that Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Deutsche Bank AG, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale, Calyon, Barclays Plc, Rabobank, Danske, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Banco Santander, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Bank of America, and Lloyds Banking Group all got money.
Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank each got about $6 billion each in payments last year. This info was from a clandestine source. We don’t know how much the others got so we don’t know the total billions spent on toxic investments, only that worthless paper was bought at 100% of original value. The estimated total is over 50 billion bucks. Okay, so what. Here’s the what; the institutions that received full payment all gave out giant size bonuses. That’s not all, these folks bought the insane risk packages and knew they where going to become loses. Every one of them should have participated in the same pain that us tax payers have to divvy up, and we didn’t even do anything. At most those ‘assets’ should have only been purchased at 80% current value.
Some will say ‘those home buyers bought out of their ability to pay.’ Okay, here’s the skinny; those folks bought houses with payments below the breakeven point. Their payments worked out to adding to the loan principle each month. Okay, so what. Well, they were told by the loan people that after 3 years when the loan was due to restructure to a conventional; making the payments more than double in some cases. They were told all they had to do was refinance to a new ARM loan to keep payments low. Seems to me that is more like renting because they would never pay off the loan, they would never own the house. When the recession slamed housing values these people couldn't refinance. Also there are hundreds of thousands of people that had conventional loans that have lost their jobs due to the recession and then they lost their homes. In addition there where renters dutifully paying every month that got kicked out because the owner didn’t pay the mortgage. While it’s true that the buyers getting ARM loans should have realized that their house of cards may collapse so maybe they deserve a little less pity then the other two categories. I consider the primary responsible parties to be Wall Street, Banks and Insurance companies. These guys are the ones who are supposed to know a bad investment.
Now let’s go to the highest leaders of our land; the House, the Senate and the Executive branch, all of which are responsible for the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). I don’t rightly know how much blame us citizens should take for electing these bozos. We did elect them in good faith to do intelligent, good things for us. That didn’t happen; illiterate used car buyers make better deals then the highest law makers in the land. Either our officials where in bed with the beneficiaries or dumb as doorknobs, probably both. Maybe we should have a recall election for all who voted for this tax payer disaster of multibillion dollar fraud. I am not saying nothing should have been done. I’m saying the money they passed out like Halloween candy very well could have been 50% less if we had a hardnosed businessman doing the job.