Dear A.I.G., I Quit!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/opinion/25desantis.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G.

DEAR Mr. Liddy,

It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

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I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

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Most recently, during the dismantling of A.I.G.-F.P., I was an integral player in the pending sale of its well-regarded commodity index business to UBS. As you know, business unit sales like this are crucial to A.I.G.’s effort to repay the American taxpayer.

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I’ll continue over the short term to help make sure no balls are dropped, but after what’s happened this past week I can’t remain much longer — there is too much bad blood. I’m not sure how you will greet my resignation, but at least Attorney General Blumenthal should be relieved that I’ll leave under my own power and will not need to be “shoved out the door.”

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End of article extracts


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So where are the traders who burned down the company, and how much did they make before they left? I don't know if this is a fair representation of the situation by DeSantis, but we may be destroying our own investment by wielding the pitchforks and torches.

The original sin was "bailing" out AIG to begin with.

His compensation for the last few years must have been ginormous.

I'm not sure he has much to gripe about.

He wasn't connected to the credit default swap part of AIGFP, he says.

If his letter is true, he really has been getting the shaft.

2007 must have been a banner year for him. You noticed he mentioned his after tax bonus because his before tax bonus must be 7 figures easy.

as his letter claims, then he got the shaft.

He's been over paid for years. At least he can afford the luxury of quitting. If I made what he made in the 2 years prior to 2008 I could/would retire and live like a king. Piss on him. I have no sympathy at all for his ass.

The company I work for has laid off 2/3 of our work force. The rest of us are only working 32 hours a week and the owner isn't even drawing a paycheck. None of us did anything wrong either. Times are tough.

But I do think we should save such justifiable ire to punish the people responsible. This letter is only his side of the story, and I question the notion that he had no idea what was going on in the CDS part of the division (although, did he say that exactly? He said he had no responsibility and no part in the decision-making progress. But could he have been one of the adults that made sure the CDS side wasn't running around with scissors? He was an executive vice president, after all.) But I do agree with his basic point -- the people who are responsible are the ones who should be hung out to dry. DeSantis asserts that he's not one of them.

I'm really sorry for your work situation. You might want to put that into a letter and explain it to Mr. DeSantis before the pity party truly gets going.

because their feelings are "hurt", I have NO sympathy for.

Them, too?

I wonder if there's more to the story. Glad he made a stand and shows a conscience. I'm sure there are real folks working there.

BUT, it smacks of kids playing with matches, then pissing their pants when the whole field catches fire.

Because somebody knew he wasn't going to be out on the street if he went a whole year with a paycheck. Unlike the rest of the country.

Poor ill-used fella. My, doesn't he sound mad. Tell you what. Why doesn't he give the AG the names of the people he does feel were responsible?

He wasn't in the credit default swap section of the business. He had no responsibility for it. His division was immensely profitable. He got paid for it.

Assuming that the letter tells the full story, why should he be treated in the way that he was?

I especially liked the response that noticed his claim of innocence was like the good Germans who couldn't smell the burning.

And, if you will notice other articles besides this self-aggrandizing crap, AIG's so-called good divisions are ALSO under water.

Were the auto workers responsible for management misdeeds? Nuh uh. Did they get to pay for them? Why yes. Let me know when you cry for them.

This entitled slimeball is very good at crying for himself. Of course, he only did what you would do, he took the money and ran.

from one end to the other.

Spare from all-or-nothing thinking, not now, not when the stakes are so high. It may feel righteous to get a hate on, but plenty of people do their jobs and do it well. It has yet to be shown how DeSantis participated in the decisions that led to AIGFP tanking the company.

should have been able to see that they were taking in the life savings of elderly schoolteachers and turning them almost directly into huge salaries and bonuses for themselves.

So it paid him with OUR money.

Excuse me? He's entitled and the auto workers aren't?

If his division was so damn profitable, they shouldn't have taken the bailout. But it wasn't profitable enough, was it? How dare that little prick think he's so damn special he's immune.

Glad you ahven't fallen for the "He was willing to work for one dollar a year" nonsense others offer here.

BTW, I don't think this letter is true. It looks too much like a republican chain email letter.

Just like only a few folks in the world can hit a 100 mph fast ball. How many folks can prepare these various business units for sale? I am not in this business, and I can only dream about DeSantis' annual compensation, but if paying him big bucks allows us to get back our $180B then I am all for it.

At the end of the day the value of businesses, especially these types of businesses, are directly tied to the knowledge of the people working in the businesses. If what DeSantis' said was true (that most folks in this division now where not around when the CDS crap was being done), then his CEO should have gone to bat for him with Congress and not rolled over. A statement like "those folks who opened a casino in this division are no longer with the company, and we are exploring whether they violated their fiduciary duty to our company and shareholders, and, if so, then we will take action to claw back undeserved compensation."

Slowly but very surely. BESIDES, HE SAID HE WAS NOT INVOLVED WITH CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS. So he's not the magic fast ball you are speciously imagining him to be. What we need are forensic accountants and plenty of them.

CDS expertise not required and probably not desired. Maybe he is just taking up space in his office, but he is willing to put his name out there and go out on a limb. He said that he and others had received offers from other companies. Maybe AIG can pick up folks on the street to do the same thing - I don't know since I am not in that business. I do know that, in my business, if certain key people left en masse then we would have issues - in some cases serious issues and we are not in a crisis mode like AIG.

It has been an established fact that AIG is going away as a complete entity since September. We all know that - that was part of the screwed up bail out that started this whole process of us becoming shareholders in AIG. Now that I am a shareholder I don't want to burn the asset down. I want to get my money back.

The so-called "good" divisions aren't selling without federal guarantees either. Yeah, this executive is real valuable.

working for businesses that lack even the most rudimentary sense of ethics. Banks used to be trustworthy institutions. The current employees and CEOs have turned them into rackets, into casinos where the unwary are cajoled and seduced into playing games in which the odds favor only the dishonest. The whole industry needs to be cleaned out. Employees of banks should be required to pass ethics exams. Believe it or not, attorneys have to pass ethics exams. It's not too much to ask. And the financial industry should set up organizations similar to bar associations that enforce ethical standards on all who work in the financial industry.

Guys who want to get rich quick taking risks with other people's money should be sent to work crap tables at off-shore casinos. That's where they belong. In this country, we should reward work that produces things people can use and need, not 12-14 hour days in playing roulette with the savings of elderly people.

Hmmmm.

in hopes of lighting a fire under the New President.

It didn't work, and neither did the prefabricated outrage that they pimped.
The revolution is over, and now we all have to roll up our sleeves and get to work.

And yes, the original sin was committed by Bush and his cronies, and a lazy media
who kept us distracted the last 8 years with shock and awe, color coded alerts,
blonde girls and sharks....all the while Americans were busy playing a ponzi
game that many just didn't understand would come back to bite us in the ass
bigtime. I know a lot of folks who bought houses with almost no money down....
these are not strangers; they are people we all know.

We need to pass the budget as close to its original form as possible.
That's the only thing that will help us all right at this moment.

And the big banks, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, AIG, et al lead the unethical, criminal pack.

This can't come as a shock to its own industry.

I suspect that newspapers and Senate committees would LOVE to have the names of the ones who "escaped"!

Something does not seem upfront here.

And I'll bet Mr. DeSantis has been thinking it, too.

over the news last year to anyone who was paying attention. He's even in the news again this year-- just google his name.

Nobody's hiding anything, except maybe why what Cassano did was perfectly legal, if incredibly stupid, and the frustration and embarassment of not being able to do anything to him.

And the investigations are continuing.

Here is my explanation:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=5326150&mesg_id=5326150

We have been taken big time. This employee may be an honest guy, but he and other employees in the financial industry took huge bonuses in the good years. (In my post I refer to the bonuses at Goldman Sachs for example in 2006.) The money they received in exaggeratedly high bonuses in those years should have been saved by the company for a rainy day. Instead, the top guys just took the money and ran. Now, just three years after posting huge profits and handing out equally huge bonuses, they claim to be bankrupt. The "employees" should be asked not only to forgo their bonuses this year, but to disgorge their bonuses and pay from prior years. Sorry, but I would be happy to change places with this guy working 12-14 hours a day for a dollar. When I was younger and probably much older than he is, I worked those kinds of hours for a tiny percentage of the pay he earned in the glory years of the financial industry.

Read the post to which I provided the link above. This bail-out is the biggest financial scam in history. It makes Ponzi schemers look like amateurs. Chart the course of events from the sales of the mortgages to today's announcement of the Geithner plan to allow the five top banks to manage the disposition of the "toxic assets" (which they made toxic in the first place). This is just amazing. Let this guy go out and find another job.

These markets need to be regulated to prevent the reckless disbursements of investors' assets including the overly generous bonuses and pay to CEOs, securities sales people and managers.

Earlier today, I heard one of our "leaders" say that we could not afford to lose the guys who were supposed to receive the bonuses because they were the only ones who understand the complex formulas and computer programs used in calculating the values of the "toxic assets" and derivatives. Please, we don't need to pay these guys. We need to pass laws that insure that they never touch another cent of investors' money, never in their lives. Those formulas, that "knowledge" is precisely what got us into this rabbit's hole in the first place. These folks should not be paid one cent more for their "work." If it takes 12-14 hour workdays to destroy the economy, maybe some of these guys need to take very long vacations in a quiet, sequestered retreat somewhere.

I, like many others, work just as hard or harder than he has and dont make 50K a year. This guy was making that much a week. Or more. I have more respect for folks who actually MAKE stuff or who teach others or who keep people safe, than I do for someone who has his job. I may be in a minority but...... CRY ME A RIVER.

I start most of my days at 2:00 AM get to my office at 6:00 am and don't get home until 5:00 PM. I bring my work home on weekends. I work my ass off and I still don't clear $40,000 a year. He can afford the luxury of quitting. I can't. This MFer can kiss my ass. He made more money in 2007 than I'll make over the next 20 years.

Have we not seen these types of letters before? Looks like a clandestine campaign from the company to me. Don't fall for it.