[AmfitNom]

Heres we go again with a 3rd bailout of yet another failing company. I do understand that it is about the biggest insurance company in the world but at this point whats the use in giving AIG more taxpayer money just so they can keep bleeding the money in losses.
Link

[easypokergonj]

Heres we go again with a 3rd bailout of yet another failing company. I do understand that it is about the biggest insurance company in the world but at this point whats the use in giving AIG more taxpayer money just so they can keep bleeding the money in losses.
Link

i think there is a mistype there... as it says 4th qtr losses are both 60 bn and $5.46 billion. My guess is 60 bn for the year, and 5.46 in 4th qtr

[AmfitNom]

I would assume ur right

[EtellaObtaite]

so they can still function and workers keeps their jobs..

[AmfitNom]

function how?? by losing more money? The ppl keeping their jobs I can relate to, but more bailout will result in more money lost by this company

[kjsdiuwe]

the company got rescued because someone had buddies in Washington and not because it was worth saving, it is that simple

[Toivaluadiora]

the company got rescued because someone had buddies in Washington and not because it was worth saving, it is that simple

[rolleyes]


I'm just wondering how things would look now if Lehman had been bailed out in the first place. My guess is things wouldn've been half as bad. Unfortunately nobody saw it that way back then.

[disappointment2]

so they can still function and workers keeps their jobs..

Simple mindedness FTW.

[AmfitNom]

the company got rescued because someone had buddies in Washington and not because it was worth saving, it is that simple

I wouldnt doubt that at all!!! keep the rich rich

[Qauunet]

i think there is a mistype there... as it says 4th qtr losses are both 60 bn and $5.46 billion. My guess is 60 bn for the year, and 5.46 in 4th qtr

No mistake, they mean $60 billion in losses for Q4. There are probably some massive write-offs that aren't taken into account in the analysts' rosier estimates. AIG already lost $7.8 billion in Q1, $5.7 billion in Q2, and $24.5 billion in Q3. Yay, federal government and US taxpayers to the rescue! [cursing]

[Toivaluadiora]

No mistake, they mean $60 billion in losses for Q4. There are probably some massive write-offs that aren't taken into account in the analysts' rosier estimates. AIG already lost $7.8 billion in Q1, $5.7 billion in Q2, and $24.5 billion in Q3. Yay, federal government and US taxpayers to the rescue! [cursing]

Before you start even mentioning "the taxpayers" again, ask yourself the question how much taxes the people in the financial industry paid last year...

[kjsdiuwe]

Before you start even mentioning "the taxpayers" again, ask yourself the question how much taxes the people in the financial industry paid last year...

Which they paid because they earned a lot of money.

[Toivaluadiora]

Which they paid because they earned a lot of money.

Because they put in a lot of hours.

What I'm saying is this bailout is self financed. So stop believing all the populist crap the newspaper are spouting these days and do some thinking yourself.

[kjsdiuwe]

Because they put in a lot of hours.

So did the people who work at Intel, Google, Toyota... Companies that also paid a lot of taxes but didn't screw up.

What I'm saying is this bailout is self financed. You have completely lost touch with reality thinking that.

It is more efficent to let companies go bankrupt that are bad so they money can be used for companies that create value. Even when using that money entirely for wages and profit, you still only get the tax rate percentage out of it.

[GoodLover]

Because they put in a lot of hours.

What I'm saying is this bailout is self financed. So stop believing all the populist crap the newspaper are spouting these days and do some thinking yourself.

Self financed my ass. Everyone pays taxes. Those taxes go to feed unemployed mothers of 14, repair roads, fight pointless wars, etc. You don't get to take back your taxes for your own purposes because you suck at what you do and claim that it's your money. Its not. Once Uncle Sam takes that cash its not yours anymore, and you have no claims to it.

Bailouts are just what they sound like. The government (on behalf of the public) bailing out a company that screwed up. The company would be better off dead. New companies will rise from the ashes.

[Toivaluadiora]

Self financed my ass. Everyone pays taxes. Those taxes go to feed unemployed mothers of 14, repair roads, fight pointless wars, etc. You don't get to take back your taxes for your own purposes because you suck at what you do and claim that it's your money. Its not. Once Uncle Sam takes that cash its not yours anymore, and you have no claims to it.

Bailouts are just what they sound like. The government (on behalf of the public) bailing out a company that screwed up. The company would be better off dead. New companies will rise from the ashes.

Bullshit. You should listen to yourself man.
Take away the taxes the people and corporations of the financial industries paid in the past year only and you'll see how many unemployed mothers of 14 you would be able to pay for.

Of course everyone pays taxes. So don't say people in the financial industry didn't do their part. As a matter of fact they paid more than most people.

Just because a few lards screwed up, not every banker out there is to blame. And especially not every damn banker out there has been earning millions.

It is more efficent to let companies go bankrupt that are bad so they money can be used for companies that create value. Even when using that money entirely for wages and profit, you still only get the tax rate percentage out of it. And you say I have lost touch with reality.
Let AIG and the other big banks and insurance companies go bust. We'll see how much is left of civilization afterwards.

[AmfitNom]

Of course everyone pays taxes. So don't say people in the financial industry didn't do their part. As a matter of fact they paid more than most people.

All the individuals put together put more taxes in than any corporation and probably more than most companies put together

[GoodLover]

Bullshit. You should listen to yourself man.
Take away the taxes the people and corporations of the financial industries paid in the past year only and you'll see how many unemployed mothers of 14 you would be able to pay for.

Of course everyone pays taxes. So don't say people in the financial industry didn't do their part. As a matter of fact they paid more than most people.

Just because a few lards screwed up, not every banker out there is to blame. And especially not every damn banker out there has been earning millions.

This has nothing to do with 'every banker'. This is AIG, who is posting a $60B loss and wants $60B in bailout money. THEY LOST SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS. Why the hell do they deserve $60B in funds from taxes? The answer is simple: THEY DON'T.

I wouldn't care even if they paid $60B in taxes last year. Everyone pays taxes, and it doesn't matter how much you pay. Bill gates has paid a **** ton in taxes, but if he suddenly found himself on the unemployment list he'd get the same maximum cap everyone else does. They wouldn't say "oh damn, you've paid TONS of taxes, we'll cut you a weekly check 8,000 times bigger than everyone else". That's the nature of taxes... the kickbacks people get are completely disproportional to what they put in.. otherwise it wouldn't work. So the tax point is moot. What they put in doesn't matter in the least.

AIG is a titanic sized failboat. Why should we bail them out after they've pissed away 60,000,000,000 dollars? Keep in mind AIG is not 'the other banks'.

[Toivaluadiora]

It's not about what they deserve or not. It's about the future of a whole country. As a matter of fact, the financial industry is not bound to a country, so to be absolutely blunt it's about the future of the whole world.

Yes it's sad and annoying that the tax money is spent on bailing out a company that has failed. But if you don't do it, you don't get repercussions. You get a cataclyzm. Look what the fall of one company, i.e. Lehman Brothers did to the whole financial markets. Let one lender fail and the credit spreads go to hell and drags the rest of them along.

My point is: yes it's tax money, but if you don't rescue these failing giants, you're up for a return to the stone age. No more lending to businesses. Insurance contracts breach. Businesses fail. Governments have no other options than flooding the market with liquidity and print money. Inflation. NOW suddenly you get unemployment. I don't even want to imagine the scenario, I'll leave it up to your imagination...

All I wanted to point out is that in purely monetary terms, this bailout money has been paid for by the financial industry many times over in one year in forms of taxes. I never mentioned that they deserved it.

[glazgoR@]

This has nothing to do with 'every banker'. This is AIG, who is posting a $60B loss and wants $60B in bailout money. THEY LOST SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS. Why the hell do they deserve $60B in funds from taxes? The answer is simple: THEY DON'T.

I wouldn't care even if they paid $60B in taxes last year. Everyone pays taxes, and it doesn't matter how much you pay. Bill gates has paid a **** ton in taxes, but if he suddenly found himself on the unemployment list he'd get the same maximum cap everyone else does. They wouldn't say "oh damn, you've paid TONS of taxes, we'll cut you a weekly check 8,000 times bigger than everyone else". That's the nature of taxes... the kickbacks people get are completely disproportional to what they put in.. otherwise it wouldn't work. So the tax point is moot. What they put in doesn't matter in the least.

AIG is a titanic sized failboat. Why should we bail them out after they've pissed away 60,000,000,000 dollars? Keep in mind AIG is not 'the other banks'.

I'm gonna stick my bit in here, admittedly I don't know the in's and out's of the banking world or the state benefit system in America and only being 20 I have never lived through a proper recession, but this whole thing goes FAR beyond "They are being saved because they have friends in Washington" that is just ignorant.

A quick wikipedia glance shows that 116,000 people are employed by AIG alone. Although that is probably worldwide, I don't know how many are employed in the USA directly.

If AIG were to fail, let’s say 60,000 people were out of a job, all in one go. That’s 60,000 people who are suddenly not paying tax. In fact, most of them begin to claim state benefits, several thousand of them are suddenly unable to pay their mortgage and are evicted, that’s another hundred million $$$ in bad debts as their homes are repossessed. Letting that many people suddenly be without a job is surely going to put massive strain on an already overburdened economy and affects other businesses badly as well due to them defaulting on loans, not buying that car, cutting back their spending, because of the problems these people will find themselves in.

Additionally, for companies such as AIG to loose such huge sums of money (They are not alone - Royal Bank of Scotland posted losses of £26Billion ($34Billion) today for 2008) They will have investments so monumentally complex, stretching across Countries, Continents and involving countless other companies along the way, that I doubt even the banks themselves are fully aware of what they all are and where they all stretch to (I believe this is one of the reasons it's been so long between the sub-prime problems and now - the ripples have taken that long to work their way through the banks chains of investment) AIG will be involved in huge level Corporate Credit Insurance which allows many big companies to buy and sell shop-stock and materials to and from each other as they don't have the hard cash to make stock purchases so buy on credit and an Insurer will pick up the tab if it all goes wrong. Do you think companies buy oil in cash? Will the oil companies ship their container ships across the water uninsured?

Noticed how many of the companies that go under have their Credit Insurance withdrawn just weeks before?

I don’t know how far the news got to America but the run on Northern Rock a year or so back or the problems with the collapse in Iceland. All your wealth is tied up in the banks. You have a mortgage that is secured with a bank, you have your savings in a bank, your wages are paid into your bank from your employer’s bank. Pension funds are invested through banks and insurers. The councils have all their staff wages tied up in banks, their budgets will be held in a bank. If those banks suddenly go “Sorry, out of cash, bye” what happens to your savings, your wages, your pensions? How do you live? There will be anarchy and I don’t believe that’s a particular “doom and gloom” way to look at things.

The banks and Insurance companies prop up a very hollow economy, take them away and the rest comes tumbling down with it.

It's my opinion that these bailouts are a far cheaper way of dealing with things than letting everything collapse. I can pretty much guarantee that the governments would not be bailing out the banks in a capitalist society unless it was absolutely necessary.