Being Held Ransom

OK, lets step back and really look at this whole AIG bonus issue. We are being held ransom and the alternative to paying the ransom is the scariest thing known to man; the unknown (maybe not the SCARIEST but certainly the most expensive). This money is being given to the very people who blew up AIG. Why? To keep them from doing worse damage by letting the rot fester into a bigger infection (can it actually get bigger? Why yes it can. A whole lot bigger. That, is the scary unknown.)

To understand you have to get inside the mind of the traders who did this in the first place. They are not nice guys who got caught up in a game they couldn't win. The very definition of a wall street (notice the lack of capitalization of "wall street" and the respect capitalization provides to an organization/noun) type trader is someone who has no conscience and no fear. They are out for themselves first, themselves second, themselves third, ....., their firm 20th, and everyone else comes in somewhere around 42nd. Traders will bet against their fellow in-firm traders to get their "book" to be the biggest and thus be the most highly compensated. Now ask yourselves what would happen if you ask an intelligent, extremely highly paid, amoral trader who has already brought the nation to its fiscal knees, that "nope no bonus for you. Please keep unwinding trades with little in the way of compensation out of the goodness of your heart" (this of course assumes they still have a heart. No really). What I come up when I ask that question is that the amoral trader will say *$#% ^%* and then institute a trade that will really blow things up. We are talking serious money. Why do they care, they have made more money in the past 5 good years then they know what to do with and ride off into the Bahamian sunset.

We are paying a ransom and no matter what the Pres or congress (see my last post about what a congress is made of) say these bonuses will be paid by you and me and we'll smile as we hand over the money. If we don't, then we now have the unknown to look forward too and right now that is the scariest thing of all.

PS I DO NOT condone the behavior of these traders and AIG in general. To my knowledge no laws of the land were broken but moral laws definitely were breached.