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As for your bet, I won't take it. It's phrased too broadly. And frankly, with Congress demonstrating their willingness to completely hose these guys for electoral safety vice sound policy, it's a bad bet. An AG can, after all, indict a ham sandwich.

Finally, it has nothing to do with whether the money is "earned". It is strictly about meeting obligations in general, and more importantly, our elected government honoring its freely engaged obligations in specific.

These people have the best knowledge of the AIG book.

Maybe... but they apparently got up to speed pretty quick if all the people who actually wrote the contracts are gone. My point is... these people are replaceable. And they should not, as a consequence, be receiving outsized compensation as if they were irreplaceable.

Look, either this is a well-run business, in which case any number of competent people can look at well-maintained records and unravel the positions. Or it is a crime scene and should be sealed.

We're talking about, what, $165 million in bonuses to AIGFP. You really want me to believe that this is the best bargain we can drive to hire competent people to close down the division?

With all due respect, there is a unfortunate presumption among many people that if someone makes a ton of dough, they must, somehow, have earned it. Some do, but a lot don't. And there is a ton... a ton... of luck in ending up at the right place at the right time with the right bosses and right economic conditions. Don't mistake the fact that a lot of these AIG guys made big bucks for the claim that they are indeed the best and the brightest.

Bernard, you have exactly ZERO evidence that any of the individuals who are under fire for the crime of "getting paid what they were promised" have committed any wrongdoing. In fact, if Liddy's testimony is truthful, none of them did anything wrong at all.

Au contraire my combative interlocutor... there is a ton of suggestive evidence... moreso than at a similar point in the Worldcom or Enron unraveling.

It turns out these were not retention contracts at all. They were just converting incentive pay into guaranteed pay... and why? Because by late 2007 AIGFP could see the whole scheme beginning to collapse. Was that in the public disclosures? Securities fraud. Also, beginning in 2007, AIGFP began limiting the access of internal auditors to their trades. They were trying to cover up what was turning into a Ponzi scheme. We don't have clear evidence of wrongdoing... but we do have very strong prime facie evidence of it.

I'll be you $100 that criminal charges come out of this.

What happened at AIGFP is standard practice throughout corporate America. America's corporate titans like to talk endlessly about performance-based pay and how capitalism rewards risk, but in real life compensation packages are almost always constructed to avoid as much risk as possible. If you work in a growing industry, your bonus depends on raw growth rates. If you work in a declining industry, your bonus is linked to relative growth rates. If the market is up, your bonus is paid in stock. If it's not, suddenly deferred comp and increased pension contributions are the order of the day. Heads you win, tails you win.

The AIG traders who got this sweetheart deal are nothing special. Management probably didn't even think twice about it. Of course you switch from performance bonuses to retention bonuses when the market looks stormy. What else would you do?

And see this, Dissecting the A.I.G. Bonus Contract, for another discussion of the contract itself.

And now, like Iago, I will say: ``Demand me nothing; what you know, you know''.

h, and a quick question for the Democrat readers, supposing the special AIG tax goes through how do anticipate the Republicans will use it when they get back in charge of things?

Not all your Democratic readers like the idea of taxing the AIG bonuses. I happen to disagree with it for reasons other than fear or retribution.

(Sometimes a problem we know about bothers us less than a new problem on top of it all.)

Absolutely true, Steve. I guess my point, such as it is, is that contracts don't have the absolute sacrosanctity that I gathered, perhaps incorrectly, some were asserting. I guess if you're too big to fail, then your contracts are to hard to break.

Sam, aside from the differences already pointed out, I think you ask the wrong question. As you pointed out yourself:

Unions associated with private companies have protection from their contracts being summarily broken; the judge ruled that municipal unions do not.

And that's because:

Municipal bankruptcy is so rare that no judge had yet ruled on whether Congressional reforms in the 1990s that required companies to provide worker protections before attempting to dissolve union contracts also applied to public workers' union contracts

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael McManus held March 13 that when Congress enacted 11 U.S.C. sec. 1113 to limit companies from outright rejection of union contracts it limited it to Chapter 11 bankruptcies. By failing to extend the limits to Chapter 9, which covers municipal bankruptcy, McManus said cities have broader latitude to break existing union pacts.

Why is it that union contracts were treated completely differently from every other contract in bankruptcy which can be voided?

Oh, and what if the confidentiality agreement is part of the same contract with the retention bonus?

Can't say for sure, but it would be awfully strange to have a confidentiality agreement (or a non-disclosure/non-compete) when the whole point of their jobs is to wind down the AIG FP business. Why would they sign such a thing?

If there were such agreements, however, I think your point is valid, but there's even more. Such confidentiality/non-com/non-disc agreements have to be supported by consideration, which often comes in the form of continued wages. If the wages aren't paid, then the agreements can't be supported. Ergo, the maligned employees can freely go to the counterparties, much to the dismay of AIG.

"So it turns out that people who didn't write the contracts can, in fact, unwind the positions... and they are doing so now."

These people have the best knowledge of the AIG book. Yes, there are people in the industry who have similar expertise, but they are not familiar with the book, and more importantly they would have no incentive to come over to AIG to do it unless they were paid big bonuses to do so......wait.

Who's next, Bernard? You're arguing for punitive taxation for "folks whose income source and amount I happen to be angry about". Not "folks who committed a crime"; not even "folks accused of a crime". Just folks at whom you have misdirected your anger.

What you're advocating isn't liberalism by any definition - other than that usually reserved to talk radio caricatures.