Well, so Long as Someone is Punished, I'm OK With It

Let's take all the bonus money back from those @^#&^#@&*^ AIG executives! They're the ones who got us into this mess.

Err, maybe not. Here's the scene from within AIG as they gathered in their office to watch their boss get pilloried on TV by a Congress and a President eager to get in front of the lynch mob.

A sense of fear hung in the room -- the palpable, unsettling kind that flashes across people's eyes. But there was anger, too. No one would express it publicly, of course. Who wants to hear a wealthy financier complain? And yet, within those walls off Danbury Road lies a deep sense of betrayal -- first by their former colleagues, now by their elected leaders.

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.

"They've chosen to throw us under the bus," said a Financial Products executive, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. "They have vilified us."

There's lots more. Read the whole thing.

After that, ask yourself this: Who would take that job if these folks quit? How long does it take to replace someone at that level and then bring them up to speed to the point where they can function and accomplish anything? How long would it take if they all decided to leave and there wasn't any corporate memory left to train the new people?

If it was me, I would have resigned yesterday. These people are getting death threats. No one knows that they had nothing to do with the collapse of AIG. No one is telling the public this. Instead, you've got all the politicians pointing fingers at everyone else saying how lenient the other guy is and how much they all hate the AIG executives.

Live it up, guys. Have fun. When you're done, you just try and get someone to work for you in AIG or anywhere else that you plan to nationalize / buy / coerce / threaten.

Here, Nancy Pelosi explains to the mob that if only she had been in charge, all banking executives from all financial institutions would be dead by now.