Dear A.I.G., I Quit | Hacker News Reader

Dear A.I.G., I Quit

nytimes.com

11 pointsFlemlord13 comments

wasn't this posted earlier? i can't find it... did it get deleted?

edit: yep. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531424 anyone know why?

anyone know why?

The discussion was stupid and the article is completely off topic and uninteresting? It's more worrisome that it has been voted to the #1 spot at the moment. WTF, HN?

Probably because the discussion was absolute trash.

this one's going to be different? :)

i mean, thats why we have the ability to vote, right? to shape and fuel the discussion how we want and in the directions we want.

sometimes it gets "ugly". sometimes it gets divisive.

And especially so when the article is off-topic reddit-bait, which is, after all, one of the reasons to keep that sort of thing out of this site. IMO, of course.

Why can the public not understand that successful people usually have obtained a level of wealth such that their "getting out of bed in the morning" price is greater than most people's monthly earnings? Someone working at McDonald's wouldn't take an extra shift for $0.25/hour. However, someone starving with no other means to support himself would fight for it. Why is it so hard to understand that these incentives scale up?

The thing that is frustrating about this to me is the following:

Imagine that two years ago, a giant hurricane hit somewhere and AIG's insurance business wasn't properly reserved/diversified. The losses were just too huge to absorb.

Now, since this is two years ago, the AIG Financial Product's CDS trades look immensely profitable, so Joseph Cassano screams about the fact that he had nothing to do with the losses and he deserves his full bonus.

I don't see how that situation is two different from the current one, just with the players switched around. Of course we don't know that this guy's trades are bad, but we also don't know that they are really profitable at the level he claims (hundreds of millions of dollars a year in his group).

Entertaining. Yet the author of that op-ed clearly forgets that We The People are bailing out his company.

While I sympathize with his complaints, if AIG is healthy enough to be paying out bonuses, then they're too healthy to be needing any sort of bailout at all.

flagged for being a duplicate of a dead article. you guys should know better than this.

Deleted comment

"I have enough cash in Swiss bank accounts that my grandchildren won't have to worry about paying for private school"

He probably has that much money, but there's no need for him to use Swiss bank accounts. It's not like anyone is accusing AIG of compensating employees under the table.

"He was shocked, absolutely shocked...."

Why does it matter if he knew or not. The janitors might have known as well, but we aren't attempting to garnish their wages as punishment. After all, he swept the floors as he was told. The issue isn't knowledge -- it's control. One might have a duty of some sort to report fraud, but poor risk management isn't illegal. So, how is this guy any different than the hypothetical janitor? The guy who wrote the letter claims that his business unit was legitimately profitable.

The issue is control? As Executive Vice President (note that a conjugation of execution is in the title), if you don't have control enough to stop poor risk management that you're aware of in your own division...something's already very, very wrong.

He was claiming that his division wasn't writing CDOs on MBSs. So, it was somebody else's division.

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