NYTimes.com: A.I.G. Planning $165 Million in Bonuses After Huge Bailout

NYTimes.com: A.I.G. Planning $165 Million in Bonuses After Huge Bailout

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to 400 executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them.
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“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.

I’m not too impressed with A.I.G’s “best and brightest”.  Why do these people still have jobs?

Bankruptcy would have taken care of these contracts, but the government could not let A.I.G go bankrupt because of the effect on the financial system.  But, by saving A.I.G., the government has saved the contracts that now reward the ones that created the losses.