So this happened:
Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley suggests AIG executives should take a Japanese approach toward accepting responsibility for the collapse of the insurance giant by resigning or killing themselves.
The Republican lawmaker’s harsh comments came Monday during an interview with Cedar Rapids, Iowa, radio station WMT. They echo remarks he has made in the past about corporate executives and public apologies, but went further in suggesting suicide.
Grassley says AIG executives should follow “the Japanese example” by publicly apologizing and “do one of two things: resign or commit suicide.”
And then his spokesman said he didn’t really mean it:
Casey Mills says the senator “doesn’t want U.S. executives to do that,” but says those who accept tax dollars and spend them on travel and bonuses do so irresponsibly.
And then we were reminded, this isn’t the first time Grassley’s urged executives to kill themselves:
[The senator] said executives at firms that seek government help need to take responsibility for “driving their corporations into the ground” and adopt a “Japanese ethic.”
“One of the things you do is, you either go out and commit suicide, or you go before the American public and you take a very deep bow and you say, ‘It’s all my fault and I’m sorry and I’m going to straighten it out.’ Or you might resign,” Grassley said.
And that’s why, au contraire, Casey, we think he does.
C.G. is voicing the sentiment and desire of much of the American Public, not just towards AIG, but also many of the other Wall Street Execs, who are now long gone (Read Stan O’Neal). These guys are spending their golden parachutes, or should be, on security for themselves and their families!!!
I thank the good Lord for giving me 49 years of invigorating challenges, stimulating experiences, many happy occasions, and, most of all, the finest wife and child any man could ever desire. Now my life has changed, for no apparent reason. People who call and write are exasperated and feel helpless. They know I’m innocent and want to help. But in this nation, the world’s greatest democracy, there is nothing they can do to prevent me from being punished for a crime they know I did not commit. Some who have called have said that I am a modern day Job. Judge Muir is also noted for his medieval sentences. I face a maximum sentence of 55 years in prison and a $300,000 fine for being innocent. Judge Muir has already told the press that he, quote, “felt invigorated” when we were found guilty, and that he plans to imprison me as a deterrent to other public officials. But it wouldn’t be a deterrent because every public official who knows me knows that I am innocent; it wouldn’t be a legitimate punishment because I’ve done nothing wrong. Since I’m a victim of political persecution, my prison would simply be an American gulag. I ask those that believe in me to continue to extend friendship and prayer to my family, to work untiringly for the creation of a true justice system here in the United States, and to press on with the efforts to vindicate me, so that my family and their future families are not tainted by this injustice that has been perpetrated on me.
[...]
Please leave the room if this will offend you.
Japanese example:
1. Publicly apologize, resign
2. Wait 6 months, take lucrative “consulting” position at subsidiary
3. Profit!
I’d like to demand the same of Barney “Fish Lips” Frank, Chris Dodd, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorelick and Rahm Emanuel.
With regards to Barney, I’ll settle for him being put in a stock, bent at a 90 degree angle, at Attica Prison in the exercise yard for a week with a sign on his forehead and his “cheeks” saying “ENJOY YOURSELVES ENDLESSLY”
Why are we still talking about AIG every day? We’ve had 6 months to wrap them up and move on. President Obama is an idiot for allowing this bad press to continue on a daily basis. Void all these un-voidable contracts by throwing AIG into bankruptcy; have the US Treasury backstop those CDS contracts that are needed to avoid another financial collapse. This isn’t rocket science.
@5
“Void all these un-voidable contracts by throwing AIG into bankruptcy; have the US Treasury backstop those CDS contracts that are needed to avoid another financial collapse. This isn’t rocket science.”
If not for the $450B in CDO-squared insurance contracts AIG wrote, of which we the taxpayers have already paid off $150B, I would agree with you. I don’t want my kid taking that debt on. The CDS need to be voided, but a bankruptcy filing would induce panix. Obama has to figure out that he has to go to the Supreme Court to abrogate contracts, whether they be subprime mortgages, CDO indentures, or AIG CDS. Until that happens, same old same old.
-crabs
6,
As EP has carefully pointed out a few posts back, that’s setting quite the precedent. Love it or hate it, after that time the world is most definitely a different place.
So AIG employees are basically government workers? At least they don’t need to worry about losing their jobs now.
@6
Do I care about setting precedent? Not when my kid is going to have to take on the debt burden of making AIG whole on their CDS, Citi whole on their CDOs and Countrywide whole on their option ARMs? These “contracts” were unregulated snd should never have existed in the first place. Sorry about the contract law, but until it’s cast aside, we end up monetizing 29 years of fictive mortgage cash flow.
-crabs
“These “contracts” were unregulated snd should never have existed in the first place.”
Where did you get the idea that an “unregulated” contract “should never have existed in the first place.” ?
That’s quite an odd notion, really.
Stopped reading at “Do I care about setting precedent?”
Ah, have we learned nothing from making rash decisions in the past?
Hello WTC. Sad to see you’ve fallen so low. What can I do to appease you and your friends?
EP-
Where did you get the idea that an “unregulated” contract “should never have existed in the first place.” ?
Because insurance companies are typically required to have adequate reserves in place before they write policies. In the case of AIG, no one bothered to look, and now the insurance commissioner is “shocked, shocked”.
-crabs
“President Obama is an idiot for allowing this bad press to continue on a daily basis. ”
yes, unfortunately, unlike certain other administrations, he doesn’t so explicitly attempt to control the media.
@11
Do I care about where you choose to stop reading? My guess is that you do not have children. Lathering on the debt burden becomes their problem, not ours.
-crabs
“My guess is that you do not have children. Lathering on the debt burden becomes their problem, not ours.”
Indeed. Due process is a terrible legacy to leave them.
“Because insurance companies are typically required to have adequate reserves in place before they write policies. In the case of AIG, no one bothered to look, and now the insurance commissioner is “shocked, shocked”.”
That’s about the most naive description of AIG and its regulatory morass I have yet seen.
donate the money to charity
or kill yourself in such a way that you die slowly through excessive bleeding
EP-
Ordinarily I would agree with you. But these are exceptional times, and require exceptional solutions. You cannot ask our children to fund Countrywide writing option ARMs at a minimum payment of 1% to borrowers who could not afford a rate reset. You cannot ask our children to fund AIG because their Gaussian copula model turned out to be irrelevant and void. You have to void these contracts, in our lifetime, otherwise you prove that insanity can and does translate into reality.
0 crabs
“Ordinarily I would agree with you. But these are exceptional times, and require exceptional solutions.”
And that’s where the discussion ends… as there is no place for rationality any longer once this bargain is struck- all the more dangerous when it is touted as the “sane” option in the face of the insanity of the sanctity of contract.
12,
I usually don’t chase people down with incorrect information, but the contracts were written and signed in May 2008. That was quite some time ago, considering everything that’s occurred in the last 7 months.
Believe me, I’m just as upset as you regarding their counterparties and contracts; however, deals are deals. It sucks that AIG was incompetent. Furthermore, it sucks that when our handsome prince (see: fed) rode in, attention to detail wasn’t something they wanted to bother with (“We can patch that up as it tears.”).
We’re all so fucking fucked, but writing law and asking employees to off themselves isn’t going to put another penny in your pocket. I’m all for dissent, but it needs to hold water in the legal realm. Right now, we have angry people.
Maybe we really are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
EP-
Then I leave it to you to figure out how to recoup the $30B+ of taxpayer money paid to GS on these contracts. Is there sanctity in those? Good night
- crabs
@ EP — don’t get your panties in a bunch about due process. He/she said we should put AIG into bankruptcy, not torch the magna carta. In bankruptcy, getting fucked is all the process that a creditor is due.
And he/she makes a good point. If regulators had more time to think things through and plan, they probably would have announced some kind of prepack with U.S. as DIP financer. You probably could figure out a way to get close to 100 cents on the dollar to the CDS counterparties b/c their contracts are secured and should enjoy some priority(?). Executives/high-priced fuck-ups get beans along with the rest of the trade creditors. That approach would have the benefit of protecting significant financial institutions as counterparties without wasting money on these talentless fuck-ups.
You can also save your hysterics about Obama/socialism/etc. I have no problem with pay for performance arrangements. It’s just puzzling why fuck-ups are receiving such large bonuses, since fuck-ups are a dime a dozen in this country.
1945 Robert Byrd thinks Obama should do the same.
“[W]e should put AIG into bankruptcy.” What does that mean? Honestly, I’m not fucking around. What does that mean?
I mean…I’m drinking, but seriously. Explain, in detail.
@23- cause he’s a piece of shit racist…like you, merks?
Precedent and consistency are way overrated, and why President Obama is failing. The rule is if you are a douchebag and bankrupt your company, you don’t get tens of millions in bonus. Make that the consistency. Making Lehman and Bear Stearns fail was great because the ongoing abuses are not daily headlines; the country can work on the new problems. Bankruptcy is a valuable tool President Obama is afraid to use. That is hurting the country every day.
Nobody cares about AIG employees, their bonuses, their severance packages, their retirement funds, their vacations, their cocktail parties, their facials performed on golf courses, whatever. Those clowns are dead to us, and should be dead to Obama’s team. Enough is enough.
24 — It means not offer them a line of credit in advance and instead let them file. (Had the government not given AIG assistance, AIG would have had to file to protect assets from creditors.) Of course, for the prepack to work there would have to be some kind of negotiation ahead of time between the U.S. (as prospective DIP financer) and the CDS counterparties and other creditors. I’m not a bankruptcy guy, so I don’t know exactly how that would work, but I think it would have been possible had the time pressure not been so severe.
In any case, the larger point was just that contracts get rescinded all the time in bankruptcy. Breaking promises is what bankruptcy is all about.
-22
@26- your comment would’ve made an ounce of sense if Obama hadn’t come out today AGAINST THE MOTHER FUCKING AIG BONUSES.
idiot.
“@ EP — don’t get your panties in a bunch about due process. He/she said we should put AIG into bankruptcy, not torch the magna carta.”
If that’s all we were talking about, there’s no need for “exceptional solutions.” But, obviously, that’s not all we were talking about.
I personally wouldn’t have an issue forcing AIG into bankruptcy. I think it should have been done awhile ago. However, clawing back pre-petition salary and bonuses because “AIG clowns are dead to us,” isn’t bankruptcy.
This: “Sorry about the contract law, but until it’s cast aside, we end up monetizing 29 years of fictive mortgage cash flow,” is not the sage, legal process of bankruptcy. This is the acrid stench of revenge and you should all be smart enough to know better.
“Executives/high-priced fuck-ups get beans along with the rest of the trade creditors. That approach would have the benefit of protecting significant financial institutions as counterparties without wasting money on these talentless fuck-ups.”
I’m with you there. But guess what. Didn’t happen. You can’t un-unhappen it now and just decide that you are going to… what… sue every AIG employee for the last 365 days of pay they got? Oh, not every employee? Just the evil ones? Oh, wait, you mean just the ones who got big checks. Bigger than… what exactly? Oh… so we’ll just have some arbitrary amount that is not evil, and everything over that is de facto evil? What about the division that consistently returned 15% on its P/L. Fucked like everyone else? Ok, maybe we will just sue the top 25 employees as measured by compensation? If compensation at AIG is evil, top comp = top evil?
I mean, it gets to be a pretty scary joke of a legal system pretty quickly… that is unless you are so blinded by the “quick fix” (which creates as many problems, just for a “better class of people”) that you don’t really give a fuck what happens to something so small as, say, contracts, or the rule of law.
The problem is not that people don’t want AIG in bankruptcy… the problem is that for the depth they want to cut and the places they want to do the cutting bankruptcy simply isn’t going to get it done. So “bankruptcy plus” or “bankruptcy with windfall profit seizure bonus prize” is called for. After all, these are exceptional times.
27,
Taking CDS exposure from AIG would make them, most likely (I have zero access to their info), solvent. If I’m correct, where do we go from there?
30 (addendum),
The “solvent” addition is more than likely ridiculous considering how deeply entrenched they truly are regarding RE (and such), but c’mon. The U.S. gov. pays off all those other parties, but kills the big, bad she-male (which after castration is quite whole). Is this company gonna stick around for a night-cap, or are we shoving her out the door? It’s all or nothing, and I personally would’ve never offered her that vodka and soda (with a twist) to begin with. Her manners are for shame!
Let’s assume that AIG is eligible to be a debtor under the bankruptcy code.
First off all of the regular insurance subsidaries are adequately capitalized (ring-fenced). These entities could be sold and would not need to go into bankruptcy, assuming corporate formalities were followed.
Bankruptcy prevents a race to the courthouse. Additionally, bankruptcy allows the debtor to reject contracts. The bonus employment contracts would be rejected by the debtor. The executives would become unsecured creditors. Most derivative contracts (CDS, swaps, CDOs, options, etc…) are safe harbored so they would be liquidated by the counterparties upon the filing of the bankruptcy petition. All of the counterparties (GS included) would be unsecured creditors and would receive shares in a liquidating trust that would slowly sell off all the unencumbered assets of AIG (the assets not ring-fenced or subject to liens). This is the simple and elegant solution envisioned by the framers of the bankruptcy code. It happens all the time in small town America.
If this causes major financial institutions on Wall Street (the unsecured creditors of AIG) to become insolvent, then place those institutions into FDIC receivership and create a good bank/bad bank split a la Willem Buiter’s recent posting (a hypothetical division of RBS).
This only requires political will. The math is easy. This solution allows us to get started on the road to recovery today.
Kill the zombies.
#6 wrote: “Obama has to figure out that he has to go to the Supreme Court to abrogate contracts, whether they be subprime mortgages, CDO indentures, or AIG CDS. Until that happens, same old same old.”
Irrelevant. If the contracts are declared void, the counterparty still eats the credit losses. I don’t know what portion of that $450B is domestic, but does it really matter if let’s say $300B is backstopped by the taxpayer on AIG’s balance sheet, or on some other institutional investor’s?
@32, I second your motion…
~SEG
Kill the Zombies
32 Continued…
Contracts are sacred under the US Constitution EXCEPT in bankruptcy (Article I).
Another thought- Everyone Thank God NY State’s Insurance Commissioner didn’t follow Gov. David Paterson’s plan to allow AIG to upstream capital from its ring-fenced insurance subsidaries to its insolvent parent.
This post is in response to a thread entitled “Mob Threatens to Bring Down Insurer”:
“5 My wife works in the main AIG building downtown – she would not know a derivative if it hit her in the head – she has the much more respectable job of denying money to cripples and orphans (hey, shut up, she’s trying to protect YOUR money). Anyway, it’s the building they always show on the news and they’ve had protesters there for the last few days. It is bad enough that Obambi wants to make it easier for Al Quaeda to attack NY again, but now he and his cretin party are trying to incite violence down on Wall Street? I guess this is what we get for electing a community organizer (a/k/a rabble-rouser, agitator, etc) intead of a leader. Thanks Obama voters – I am holding you all responsibe for her safety.
Posted by: Holdfast at March 17, 2009 12:10 AM (Gzb30) ” http://minx.cc/?post=284401
This is ridiculous, people need to engage their brains.
@32
AIG the parent is eligible under the Bankruptcy Code (only the subs, as insurance companies are not).
GS et al. have collateral (that’s where all these “payments” referred to in the press have gone). They would not be unsecured creditors but secured creditors. No liquidating trusts for Leon.
“6
Psssssst, guess who holds the insurance on congressional pensions…
Follow the money.
Posted by: navycopjoe at March 17, 2009 12:11 AM (EmdYj)” http://minx.cc/?post=284401
Even if this were true, the pensions would not be affected anyway, right?
#2: very funny, but you are going to hell.
AIG might as well be Umbrella Corp in rl. They’re monsters!
Equity Private:
I have been reading your posts with a mixture of contempt and fascination. The kind of fascination one feels when watching guests humiliate themselves on Maury Povich.
I don’t know who you are or where you were educated, but you obviously have no clue when it comes to contract law or due process.
Contracts are voided or modified routinely for a variety of legal reasons. Any first year law student can tell you what they are. None of these legal bases for contract vitiation or modification raise any due process or other constitutional issue.
There may or may not be grounds for seeking relief from the contracts in this case. We don’t know because we haven’t seen the contracts.
Even if the contracts are not subject to a legal defense, the bonus payments can be lawfully recouped through special taxation. I was extremely pleased to see that this is now being actively considered in both the House and the Senate. Although I am sure your nonexistent legal education will prompt you to object to this approach, the reality is that the law is well-established that a sovereign has extremely broad authority to craft taxation rates, and that these rates can be both narrowly targeted and retroactive. So eat it.
Notice the Democrats let the Jews at Goldman Sachs get paid on their $30.0B in contracts before making a stink about these $0.2B in bonuses.
Can you apply a good AIG / bad AIG concept and ringfence the parts of the business that work (underwriting, insurance businesses)?
Do these CDS contracts have claim against the money reserved for insurance losses / claims?
Maybe AIG could serve as a model to unwind / deconstruct a financial institutional too big to fail.
Given the political climate, if there were ever a time to put the banks into their place, it is now.
@2….Mr. Madoff, Is that you?
@41
Not even a large minority of GS employees are of the tribe. Jesus.
@Lowly Assistant – re # 2 – It seems less disturbing when the Japanese do it in the movies.
too hari, didn’t kari.
40 – Bravo! I know lawyers are meant to scuttle around doing the bidding of their front office masters, but just occasionally that tedious education can actually come in handy, eh?
AIG is the poster child for why we created the bankruptcy system. Yes, it sucks and is certainly not an option to take lightly but letting AIG bankrupt the country slowly isn’t looking so good…particularly with citi, bac, countrywide right behind…Maybe we should learn from the LEH bankruptcy — the world hasn’t ended unwinding their positions.tions.
@44 – But they control GS through Illimunati Holdings Corporation amd Gnomes de Zurich AG.
I like Grassley’s approach so long as we apply to the political class as well. B Frank, let’s roll the dice with Fannie/Freddie: Dead. Right down the list, both sides of the aisle, culpable parties dead. We need to embrace death as a tool to resolve this crisis, but limiting its application to the AIG execs is shortsighted. Go big early, kill on Wall st, kill in DC, kill off some media types that cheerleader this debacle, mortgage fraudsters and so on. The key to the Grassley solution is to cast a wide net.
Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes…
Change was the rallying cry on the election. Change won, bring it on.
@40 Its the law. The third Reich had some interesting laws. You with your extensive legal education, which obviously left you retarded, would have had no “moral” problem enforcing them. Did your extensive legal education leve you a mindless idiot with no will of his own left to follow the will of the soverigen?
Grassley’s is now the leading bid in the “hate Wall Street the most” auction. I expect the Democrats will protect this crucial piece of their franchise.
What really worries me is that the GOP is the only institution whose nominal principles are somewhat aligned with how people and society actually work. Their abandonment of principle under Bush and in control of Congress paved the way for the current leadership vacuum. If they haven’t learned that lesson, they won’t get better; and if they don’t lead, no one will.
If Republican Senators can’t overlook tangents like this and focus on the business at hand, it’s hard to imagine who will.
@40 Mr Legally Educated… could you please cite some examples of “narrowly targeted and retroactive” taxes in the US? I had the belief that the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9) frowned on retroactive measures (although admittedly there are some exceptions)…
@ AJ:
I don’t think Article 1, Section 9 applies. Messiah is a religious term, not a title of nobility.
@54 And Obama said “Take back their bonuses.” And it was so. And Obama saw that it was good?
I’m sure the 1L @40 would like to forget that in this instance it is the federal government that is trying to retroactively void a bunch of payments that appear otherwise to be quite legal. If our eager legal beaver doesn’t think that has due process issues then there’s not much more to discuss, is there?
As to applying a retroactive “AIG Tax,” at least that approach has the forthright honesty to admit “You know, we have no idea how to steal your money other than to just declare it ours by taxing you… personally.”
Since the powers that be are at a loss to come up with a theory to undo these payments without sending an already busy Tim “The Safecracker” Geithner to the law library to come up with something creative, I would say the case for arbitrary confiscation is a bit weak unless they want to pass a bill.
And let’s just ask ourselves: do we want Congress passing bills undoing otherwise legal transactions for a specific group of executives because the mob thinks them “unfair” ?
The lawyer @ 40 is a retard. Ex post facto laws aside, the sovereign’s power to tax is not the same as a supposed power to undo valid contracts.
Hey Grassley, why not start at the beginning with Phil Gramm, Jim Leach and Thomas J. Bliley?
You know, your buddy politicos who started this mess.
“You got to clean up you own backyard” – Little Junior
#58 = art school grad
59 = in denial
@58 If you’re going back to Glass Stegal, then you have to start at the beginning: Jimmy Carter and the Community Reinvestment Act.
40 here -
Ex post facto laws can indeed raise due process issues in the context of criminal law. But it is not an issue in taxation and that issue was settled a long time ago.
The levy of a special tax would not “void” either the employment contracts or the payments; it would simply tax income as described at a high level. (Indeed, this income would have been routinely taxed at a 90% marginal rate in the 1950s and 1960s.) The contracts would still be valid contracts. The payments due to the execs would be paid (and only taxed as income after receipt by the execs). Any other benefits that these execs realized under those contracts (regular salary, insurance, etc.) would be unaffected.
Equity Private and others may not like that the government has broad discretion in taxation, but not everything one dislikes is illegal or unconstitutional. The check on Congress’s overdoing it with special taxation and/or retroactive taxation is political, i.e., if the legislature over-uses or abuses the power, resistance to it will increase.
So if you don’t like the idea, write your Congressman. Start a movement to save the AIG bonuses. Might be difficult since a special tax would likely garner the support of more than 95% of the population. You might call that a mob, but I would call it “the population of the United States”.
@62… the money was already paid, you want them to enact a tax on past transfers? I understand they can use very narrowly defined tax laws for future payments but I don’t see how they can do that for historical payments.
@63
Sorry, but it can be done and has been done at both the federal and state level. Just to take one example, certain tax increases enacted during President Clinton’s first term were retroactive to Jan. 1, 1993.
The Fine Art of Bailout Seppuku
WilliamBanzai7
Bailout Seppuku (only gaijin or smelly White men refer to it as “hari-kari”) is a highly ritualized road show performance, as complicated as chado (tea ceremony). The principle difference is that at the end of chado, one is merely nauseated from too much green tea, while at the end of bailout seppuku, ones career is zombie dead.
The first thing to do is to recruit an analyst, a kaishkunin. Contrary to what is thought, almost all forms of bailout seppuku do not technically involve suicide, but merely inflicting fatal humiliation upon oneself, preferably on the internet or the Daily Show hosted my Master Sensei Jon Stewart. The kaishakunin does the actual killing. If one is ordered to commit seppuku by the bafuku (United States Congress), it will generally appoint its own kaishakunin. Otherwise, one should ask a great iaijutsuka (practitioner of the technique of killing with a single key stroke) or a close personal friend (as hard as they are to find on Wall Street these days) to be one’s kaishakunin. If asked out of friendship, one may refuse on the grounds that one’s waza (blogging technique) is inadequate; if the request is repeated, however, one should consent gracefully, as flaws in technique will be forgiven (by the blogosphere).
Bailout Seppuku is ideally committed by in a corner office or a Board Room (trading floors should not be defiled by bailout death). The participant dresses in Saville Row bespoke underwear, to express purity of intention and sits in the seiza position (legs drawn up under the body so that one is actually sitting on one’s blackberry). A servant places the sanbo (a Bloomberg terminal) before one. It will be accompanied with a tin cup, a balance sheet (water soluable paper handmade from mulberry bark) and blogging acoutrements such as an executive assistant with a wireless laptop, and a copy of the ISDA Credit Dehault swap with standard attachments (disemboweling blade). This can be a tanto (SWAP) without collateral ceiling, wrapped in several sheets of toilet paper to provide a better grip. Real Wall Street samurai, however, use their own wakizashi (ginzu steak knives). If one is of limited experience, or judged too dangerous to be trusted with complex derivatives, an autographed copy of Alan Greenspan’s book “Age of Flatulence” may be substituted for an actual blade.
The tin cup is filled with Thunderbird from the left, by an attendant using his left hand (this is indescribably rude under other circumstances). The person committing bailout seppuku then empties it in two drinks of two sips each (one sip would show greed, whilst three or more would show even more greed). This makes a total of four sips; shi, “four”, also means “trader death” (Japanese just love these kinds of puns, especially when they’re about to kill themselves).
One then writes a hail Mary sales pitch in the waka style (five lines of five, seven, seven, five, and seven syllables). The poem should be graceful, fraudulent, misleading, deceitful and about results of operations and capital resources. Under no means should it mention that the fact you are about to be terminated with “good cause”.
At this point, the person slips out of his bespoke boxers (kamishimo) and them under his chin to prevent him from doing something undignified like telling the truth or paying back last years bonus. He picks up the kozuka, and with his other hand picks up the sanbo and sticks it up his buttocks, to cause him to lean forward slightly in the proper attitude.
If the person committing is so young or so evil that Greenspan’s book has been substituted, the kaishakunin executes a kirioroshi strike (vertical) over the head as soon as the person committing bailout seppuku touches the book to his stomach. Otherwise, he will typically wait until the person plunges the ISDA SWAP into his left eye, and draws it across to the right, with a sharp upward cut at the end. A Wall Street samurai who feels himself capable may then plunge the SWAP into his groin and then up his sorry ass. However, the kaishakunin is supposed to keep a sharp (heh, heh) eye out, and strike at the first sign of pain or hesitation in his principle.
After the executive committing bailout seppuku is finally humiliated, the sanbo, the kozuka, and the katana are all sold on EBAY.
^^^
Well done.
Honestly, whatever.
Chris Dodd is the one who said they should be able to pay the bonuses in the first place and put a provision in just for that purpose. He is also the one who got a sweetheart deal from Citigroup.
Now, he wants to play outrage? Crap. This is nothing more than manufacturing a reason to be able to impose a 90% tax bracket with the blessing of the American people. How long before someone else is worthy of our national ire and needs to be punished? If we are stupid enough to fall for it, then we deserve what is coming.
As for the bonuses? Seems to me the better way to handle this is to file criminal charges for theft by deception and let the subpoenas fly!
Nah. If we are going to jerk the money barring criminal behaviour, seems to me it should be jerked from the stimulous dollars going to the states who elected DODD and given somewhere deserving like Mississippi or Louisiana.
-Tim, from Alabama