Financial Outrage Of The Week: AIG (AIG) To Pay $450 Million In Bonuses

According to The Wall Street Journal, AIG (AIG) will pay $450 million in bonuses to people in the firm’s financial products group, where may of the insurance company’s losses originated.

The paper says that AIG has told that government that “outside counsel” had advised that the previously agreed to payments to employees at the financial products unit are “legal, binding obligations of AIG.”

Too bad the government can’t void those agreements. If it can, it should. The news will probably turn a number of members of Congress against approving more capital for saving American financial firms. That, in turn, will make the process of stabilizing the credit markets more difficult.

AIG has the chance to turn Congress, and the public, completely against salvaging the financial firms essential to the national economy all by itself.

Douglas A. McIntyre