So, if somebody makes a death threat against me, and is absolutely determined and committed to following through, as long as I laugh it off and don’t feel I need to do anything about it then it’s not serious?
I don’t think that’s a great way of evaluating a threat.
I believe that the seriousness of a threat is determined by the person making it, not those receiving it.
None that I recall.
Sorry for the delay. Fixed.
The death threats are wrong and not funny but it is hard to find empathy in my heart for people who seem to have none in theirs forAmericansliving with the prospect of deathevery day.
I certainly don’t know what each individual at AIG believes or how s/he votes, but AIG has become a symbol of the oppressive economic policies championed by conservative think tanks which are funded by corporations and the hedonistic greed that destroyed the economy.
It doesn’t occur to you that the people most commonly referenced as “deeply worried about death threats” are precisely the same people most likely to benefit from such a story? The people who are most needful of public sympathy, if they want to keep their money? That doesn’t get your skeptical gland tingling?
Well, OK, you tell me: how come nobody has been arrested? Did nobody report this to the police? Well, they sure managed to find the number for the newspaper, couldn’t find the cops? Well, what about the FBI, its certainly a Federal crime to threaten rich folks.
How many such threats were there, do you know? Seems the news reports are a mite thin when it comes to verifiable or disprovable points. People are quoted as being “worried about the death threats”, but that is just about it.
Now, if you were starting some fake news to draw sympathy for these people, isn’t that just about a dandy way to go about it? Of course, you wouldn’t go to the cops or the Feebs about it, because reporting a crime that didn’t happen can get you in some deep kim chee. But you’d sure as hell get it to the *NY Times *wouldn’t you?
(Did Drudge break this story? Gonna have to send one of my minions to check that out…)
This scenario is a bit outlandish, sure. But it fits the facts. The scenario of threats worthy of serious consideration doesn’t fit that one glaring fact: nobody seems to be doing anything serious about it! What’s stopping them?
Its nifty. Start a rumor about grave threats. Ask someone if he’s worried about the grave threats (well, of course he is! he doesn’t know its bullshit!).
Release the story about his worry about threats (which is true: he is worried about threats). Next thing you know, people aren’t talking about those greedy bastards at AIG, they’re talking about the horrible threats to the innocent families!
There is nothing outlandish about it. This is the age of astroturfing, guerrilla marketing, and fake news. Starting a rumor seems like a pretty normal PR strategy.
Well, maybe not. Went to Drudge, and lo!
Story from NBC news in Conn. detailing “dozens” of threats obtained by the AG of Conn. So there is at least some substantiation for threats being made. Nothing about anything being done about it. Still, doesn’t appear to be made up out of whole cloth, though certainly exploited for every drop of sympathy.
But it’s wrong to threaten even heartless people with death.
True, but it’s important not to make individual people into abstract symbols, either.
Nor is it appropriate to make this some strange class warfare thing with snide jokes about “the rich” and individual AIG members’ incomes, and how people are willing to ‘shoulder their burden’ by accepting massive sums of cash. Quite a few people at AIG were simply doing their jobs and didn’t have oversight over trouble areas. Acting as if they all deserve to live in fear of mob justice simply because they worked for an ‘evil’ company is absurd.
AIG is responsible for the actions of all their divisions. The money that financial products div. brought in was spread to some degree around the whole company. It created a false bottom line that determined bonuses. When they took the company down, everybody should suffer. The company lost billions and had no money for bonuses. If they went bankrupt, there would have been no bonuses. They get saved by the taxpayers and it is business as normal.
Financial products division “experts” are getting billions in bonuses. It is wrong.
Precisely: They didn’t go bankrupt, which means they can’t opt out of the bonuses they said they would pay their employees, even if they wanted to.
OK, now I agree that the compensation structure in the financial sector is fucking insane. I’ve done work visas for I-bankers fresh out of school who were earning several times more than friends of mine with Ph.D.s, even in tech fields. Some of them were earning more, with bonus, than the President of the United States only a year of two out of school.
Believe me, I am no communist; I don’t believe that there is anything inherently wrong with earning a lot of money, provided you actually, you know, earn it, and do it honestly. If you can negotiate comp that high, and you are worth it, well, then more power to you. What I have a problem with is deciding, retroactively, that employees, even relatively high-level ones, have just donated half a year of their lives. I don’t know to what extent the writer of that NYT letter determined overall AIG FP policy, but it’s just plain wrong to decide after he already made an agreement, and lived up to his half of it, that the company isn’t going to live up to its half. Even if AIG had gone under and decided to cut him loose, he could have had that half a year of his life to do something else. I have a good college buddy who is a relatively high-level I-banker who is caught up in this crap, and I know how hard he has been working and what a toll it’s been taking on his health and his family life. No, I’m not worried that he is going to be out on the street, but is he not worthy of some level of compensation? How much is too much?
If you disagree with that view, please explain how high-level an employee has to be (provided he/she has not participated in wrongdoing) in order to have half a year of his life yanked away from him. Is it a function of salary, or responsibility level within the company? Would it be OK to do that to someone who would have made $250k/year? $100k? $50k?
Nobody asked these people to work long hours driving our economy into the gutter in the first place, now we’re supposed to feel sorry for them because they worked even more to try and undo their mess with the promise of bonuses agreed to before the floor fell out of their business that wouldn’t have been available if not for the bailout? Stop turning these people into fucking martyrs.
If all this bonus business is really aboveboard then AIG has done a poor job of explaining that to us, because I think most people have a conception of bonuses as something discretionary, something that assumes that the company has been successful in the last year; they don’t think of it as an entitlement for work performed. If these people have really been engaged in the dirty work that had to be done that will benefit AIG and, ultimately, all of us, why don’t they explain that to us? Until they can explain it, and their executives stop disclaiming any and all responsibility or connection to the activities that bankrupted their company, then I’m going to continue to believe that none of them deserve any bonuses and that the compensation structure in banking and finance is completely without logic.
Sooner or later, we have to have a national conversation about work and value. Someone can try and explain why a guy who shuffles credit back and forth and takes his cut is worth more than a hundred times a fireman, a teacher, a truck driver, or a farmer.
We will be encouraged to genuflect, to bow to the wisdom of the sacred Free Market. “Them what’s got shall get” will be offered as timeless and unchangeable truth, can’t change human nature, it was ever thus…you know the drill.
We don’t like such issues as who “deserves”, they are complex and icky, and often lead to painful and troubling self-examination, what do we really value, and why.
This will pass, they’ll get their money, the fix is in. But sooner or later, the questions will arise again, until we finally answer them.
Do you seriously think that every single person in the financial industry who received a bonus didn’t deserve a penny of it? Because if so, then there’s no point in even discussing this with you. I certainly agree that some of the people probably don’t, but if someone had no role in determining company strategy, and didn’t commit any wrongdoing, do you sincerely believe that the employer should have the right to rescind his/her compensation after the fact? The lower-level employees who worked 80+ hour weeks?
I’m not just talking about AIG; I’m talking about ALL the companies that have received TARP money. And I didn’t call anyone a “fucking martyr,” but it would be nice if the media and the general public acknowledged that it’s just as wrong to change compensation for white-collar employees ex post facto as it would be to change, say, an auto worker’s union agreement. The difference in this case is that the comp agreement is being changed after the work was performed.
(BTW I do not work in the financial industry and generally consider myself a moderate lefty, and am just as sickened by all of this crap as anyone else. But let’s have some kind of realistic criteria for placing blame, shall we? There is plenty of blame to go around. Even my boss, who is a partner in the law firm where I work, can’t change policy if he is outvoted by the other partners.)
I completely agree.
I don’t think it is fair to generalize nor does anyone deserves mob justice. I am sure honest, hard working people worked and continue to work for AIG, but when Wall Street casts itself as a victim, it shows a disconnect to the economic reality most Americans have lived for years. People get death threats everyday for performing abortions, standing up for gay rights, and expressing any number of political opinions. Certain social classes in our society have already felt vigilante justice for nothing more than being born. The financiers and their pawns either don’t get it or don’t care.
It is the double standard. The perception that people working at AIG are honest, hard working people who deserve to be generously compensated despite the fact that taxpayers are footing the bill, but welfare recipients are immoral cheats robbing taxpayers who deserve our collective contempt.
I am not suggesting that AIG employees are immoral. I am just pointing out the perception. Clearly, people should be compensated, but there is no sense of shared sacrifice from Wall Street. There is no sense that AIG or any of the failed financial institutions should scale back compensation since the U.S. is bankrupt. The only message from Wall Street is that they deserve to be well compensated and the American public is equally responsible for the disaster and deserve nothing, not even a mortgage bailout.
You might be interested in this letter of resignation from an AIG employee (link may require registration.)
They may also still be taxedif they give the bonuses back, and based on New York taxes, may end up paying 130% taxes on the bonus.
That’s so dramatic. You could just ask, and I’ll tell you why the salaries for traders are what they are.
First off, it’s not a job you would really want to do if it didn’t pay a lot. Some of the other jobs, like fireman, teacher, truck driver and farmer have their own rewards and attractions which are not financial. Being a trader has no such rewards.
To describe it, you use terms like “shuffling credit back and forth,” but few people actually understand how trading works and what it is, and why it’s important. That’s for the same reason few people understand calculus. To understand calculus you have to climb through basic math, algebra, advanced algebra, really “get” what the quadratic equation is all about. Once there you are ready to begin to understand calculus.
Trading financial products has a similarly steep learning curve that needs to be climbed before one can engage in it. Not many people are willing to try to climb the curve. Most of those that begin to do so, drop out, quit, or move on to something else, or find they can’t do it. To be a good trader you have to be a bit schizo. You have to be able to do mathematics as if it were poetry. Imagine trying to solve equations involving complex interractions and multiple variables while all of them are changing. You can’t solve for the actual answer, you have to solve for what the answer will be. It’s like playing chess in your head without a board or pieces. It takes some work before you can do it.
It’s extraordinarily stressful. You literally can’t get up from your desk during market hours. Traders carry empty gatorade bottles with them in the morning. Guess why?
You are working with tens of millions of dollars of the firms capital every single day. If you fuck up, you can lose it. Firms don’t like it when you lose their money by fucking up. So, there is a long process spent in finding you and training you and having you gain experience, and finally seeing if you have the knack. I’d say about one out of 50 that try to do it actually become traders.
As a good trader, you provide enormous benefits to your firm. You flat out just make the company tons of money, but you also smooth out it’s liquidity requirements, keep the company on the straight and narrow from a risk control standpoint, and you produce an inventory of product that is sought after by the salesforce and the company’s customers.
So, to summarize: Why is the salary so high?
Steep and long learning curve.
Few people can actually do it well.
Extraordinarily stressful.
No public recognition or other benefits to doing it besides compensation.
Enormously valuable to the firm.
Oh, and the salary really isn’t that high unless you’re a rock star. If you are one of the top 10% in your category, than yes the salary and bonus if very high.
Here’s a little primer on Black Scholes option theory. If you want to live this and this turns you on, currency trading might be for you.
Wow those guys were real smart. Did anyone point out 30 or 40 to 1 margins were risky to the solvency of the company? Did anyone point out that derivatives based on risky mortgages were bad business?
This mess was orchestrated. It goes back to Gramm acting in behalf of Financial Companies to break Glass. It was his subsequent modernization act that greased the skids. It was planned out. The Financial Companies poured money into politicians to get them to pass a penal bankruptcy bill.
AIG chose their regulator. Strange but they were allowed to. So they built one trust and then were eligible to have the Trust Regulators watch over them. They of course were the smallest and weakest of the potential regulators. Their freewheeling trading was planned out and they knew damn well it was risky business. But they made huge fake profits.
There had to be a lot of traders at AIG that were worried. If they were so smart ,they knew damn well what the risks were. They just kept taking the big pays and bonuses and shut up.
I don’t think the bonuses should be taxed retroactively. I actually agree with other posters on this issue. The bonuses were agreed to by someone in Treasury and therefore should be honored. Congress knew about the bonuses, so the outrage and tax proposal are disingenuous and too late.
However, it would be nice to believe people working in the financial industry understood the public outrage, and someone in a high profile position apologized for destroying the economy. If there was a sincere effort to make amends, I believe the American people would forgive. It’s the continued extravagance courtesy of the taxpayers on everything from private jets to compensation and then a defensive response to public anger that infuriates most people. Americans can’t expect universal healthcare because it’s too expensive, progressive tax policies discourage success, tax funded child care is extortion-- but executives are entitled to enrich themselves on the backs of the public.
