The AIG Bonus Fiasco and Taxpayers

JACK WELCH: Hey Larry, why don’t we step back for a minute. There’s been 24 hours of wild emotion over this thing. Who owns AIG? The US government owns AIG. Now why are they not taking charge of their situation? They appointed a CEO; it’s their CEO. He happens to be a very good man, Ed Liddy, who ran Allstate for many years. They ought to be working as a board of directors with their CEO on what the compensation ought to be. Then they ought to be either agreeing with their CEO, who’s making $1 a year, and doing it as a good citizen, or they ought to get their own man in there, this administration ought to put somebody in.

KUDLOW: But they’re saying, you know Liddy, okay he’s a good man. Basically I agree with you Jack. But you know Liddy is throwing up this blue smoke at us about the contracts. He says there are contracts.

WELCH: Larry, Larry, Ed Liddy is their CEO! They’re the board of directors! Why are they not working with the CEO to get a resolution? These guys want to be critics on the outside, and not owners on the inside. They are owners.

KUDLOW: Geithner and his group should have called Liddy down to Washington. I don’t understand this. And just sat him down and say, okay, here is the way life works. Here’s the way it’s going to work. Is that what you’re saying?

WELCH: It should have been resolved between Liddy and the Treasury, or the Fed, or whoever it is that represents the US government who is the owner of AIG! The idea that these guys who own it, can now all throw rocks at it, makes no sense. It would be like a board of directors throwing rocks from the outside and not being responsible.

KUDLOW: Well why didn’t we put them in bankruptcy in the first place? Some kind of government sponsored

brandon of IA 1:02PM March 18, 2009