Word: aig
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...bailed-out businesses, the notion that there's a correlation between excessive pay and excessive risk-taking isn't quite accurate. It may be true in the case of hedge funds or leveraged-buyout - which call themselves private-equity (PE) - firms or some parts of stricken outfits like AIG, Citi and the former Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America. But hedgies and PEs aren't covered by pay czar Ken Feinberg's ukases...
...biggest basket cases - AIG and Citi - got into trouble not because they took risks; they got into trouble because they didn't know they were taking risks. (See the top 10 financial collapses...
...divisions at AIG that brought down the firm - financial products and stock-lending - didn't understand what they were doing. Financial products wrote credit-default swaps - sorry I'm not pausing to explain them, but most eyes would glaze over if I did - that they thought were riskless but turned out to be ultra-risky...
...stock-loan department, AIG's other disaster, took the cash it got for lending out stock owned by AIG and invested the money in esoteric securities rather than in risk-free Treasuries, the standard practice. The idea was - I'm not kidding - to make an extra one-fifth of 1% in interest. When the esoterica, which the stock-loan folks thought was riskless, crumbled, so did the firm. (See the worst business deals...
...mass shooting. In his latest high-profile role, as the Obama-appointed executive-pay czar, Feinberg announced Oct. 21 that the Treasury Department will slash compensation for the 25 highest-paid executives at the seven firms that received the largest chunks of federal bailout money: Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, General Motors, Chrysler and the financing arms of the two automakers. Salaries are expected to shrink 50% on average, with the majority falling below $500,000, though firms that have already repaid their bailout debts, like JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, are not affected by the change...