How long can you stay on this tightrope?

Gretchen Morgenson from the NY Times writes in Sunday’s paper about AIG in “Behind Biggest Insurer’s Crisis, A Blind Eye to a Web of Risk“. There are a lot of lessons here, mostly reminders of lessons you’d think were already learned.

There’s a failure of leadership when you look at the practices of AIG’s London office, which has been tossing around hand grenades for years. There’s a failure of corporate governance that allows the small London office’ to ignite the firestorm that brings AIG to the government’s front steps. There’s a flood of extraordinary compensation for the 400 people in the London office (more…)

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What happened? What happens now?

Before we can even catch our breath, we learn that the Fed has bailed out AIG to the tune of $85B to forestall an even greater calamity in capital markets across the world. [You can read about this everywhere but here’s a convenient link to today’s Wall St. Journal lead article.] Probably a good thing at this juncture but so much of this would have been avoidable if many of the warning signs would have been heeded earlier.

It would be easy, but naive, to blame the greed of Wall St. for all of these problems. Sure, there’s a lot of that to spread around and some of the gaudy exit packages are illustrative, e.g., the top 3 executives at Merrill Lynch stand to gain up to $200M after being there less than one year and presiding over the passing of the venerable 90+ year old financial titan.

I think there are two key reasons why these financial tragedies appeared on stage at all. (more…)

Continue ReadingWhat happened? What happens now?