Legal Commentary

Heck Of A Job, Jakey?

By Big Tent Democrat

Jake DeSantis told us what a great job he did at AIG. Apparently, there is some evidence to doubt that. Felix Salmon writes:

Tyler Durden has a scary post up, connecting banks' profitability in January and February to the fact that those were the months when AIG Financial Products was unwinding an enormous number of its contracts en masse. These trades, initiated by AIGFP, were allegedly enormously profitable for the biggest banks in the CDS market[.]

[More . . .]

. . . If this is true, then (a) the banks still aren't anywhere near sustainable profitability, and (b) those AIG retention bonuses -- paid on the grounds that only the people who got AIG into this mess could get it out -- are even more egregiously untenable than we had suspected. The whole point of having the government take over AIG was that it wouldn't need to enter into panicked unwinds. If it went ahead and did that anyway, the levels of competence and oversight at AIG are even lower than most of us had thought. Which is quite an achievement.

You did a heck of a job, Jakey.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 30, 2009 (boomark / email).