I don't know about you or Cuomo, but when I'm considering a job, I don't say "the company is going to have a bad year, so I'm going to take a pay cut and stick it out". I say "If I can do better elsewhere, I'm leaving". (Interestingly enough, I say that even if the company is going to have a good year.)

AIG was and is going to have trouble hiring good people. We're telling folks that AIG won't live up to its agreements. Who is that going to help?

Apart from shoveling money to Goldman Sachs, AIG is in the process of unwinding a lot of transactions.

AIG is going to lose money and go under no matter what. However, that doesn't imply that good people aren't needed. The amount of money lost depends on how well the unwinding is done.

Me - I'd like the unwinding to be done so as to lose as little money as possible. If you agree, how do you propose to do that without hiring good people?

Of course, you may think that good people can be had for less than AIG thinks. Do you have evidence for that theory beyond "you can't do any worse" and "AIG went into the toilet"?

As I pointed out elsewhere, AIG's mortgage portfolios have performed as advertised....

Interesting "Me - I'd like the unwinding to be done so as to lose as little money as possible. If you agree, how do you propose to do that without hiring good people?"

Interesting how in the financial industry, there is a working assumption that skilled financial people require a lot of money to hire and maintain. Yet the financial industry is quite happy to save money by hiring H1-b's for their lower costs while arguing that they can provide equivalent quality.

Yes, one would certainly like AIG's unwinding to be done competently. Does that mean that it has be done by the same class of people-seekers who seem to have gotten us into this mess and who expect their every profitable or unprofitable action to be "bonused" to the hilt?

Possibly not.

The Federal government, for example, has a large and highly competent workforce that it pays much less than the financial industry pays its "whiz kids".

> Does that mean that it has be done by the same class of people-seekers who seem to have gotten us into this mess and who expect their every profitable or unprofitable action to be "bonused" to the hilt?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03...

"The handful of souls who championed the firm’s now-infamous credit-default swaps are, by nearly every account, long since departed. Those left behind to clean up the mess, the majority of whom never lost a dime for AIG, now feel they have been sold out by their Congress and their president."

"If they did walk out the door, who would volunteer to work at the Chernobyl of the financial world? And what would become of the mammoth portfolio that remains?"

"'It would become the biggest naked position on Wall Street,' one longtime Financial Products executive said, 'and everybody would exploit it.'"

AIG's CEO was picked by the Feds last year. He decided that these folks were the best that he could get for the job. (The existence of federal employees competent at something else doesn't imply that they're any good at unwinding AIG as profitably as possible.)

Maybe he's stupid, incompetent, and/or corrupt. But, surely you've got some actual evidence that a significantly better or at least cheaper job can be done.

There is a difference between "highly competent" and someone who has a Phd in Physics or a degree in quantitative finance. The majority of these positions on Wall Street are filled with Indians and Chinese because not enough Americans are willing to study this stuff, but believe me those people are not underpaid.