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Forums - General - Wall Street is like a reality show now

akuma587 on 19 March 2009
Words Of Wisdom said:
akuma587 said:
I'm sure all of those people who are currently being paid those bonuses prefer what just happened. Don't be surprised if everyone's name who was paid a bonus is released to the public. This will follow some of these people for the rest of their lives and quite a few of them might lose their jobs.

Is there a reason that you posted again with pretty much the exact same content as your previous post without responding at all to anything I said?  Redundancy is boring.

Why are you just hiding behind contract law?  Do you honestly think that a jury would have been very sympathetic to these people?

Not to mention it was a stupid move for the company financially.  The company probably lost more money because of this fiasco by NOT breaching these contracts than it did by fulfilling them.  Their stock price took a big hit and there image as a company will likely be permanently stained.  Do you think that has no monetary value?  Or less monetary value than some bonuses?

There is no law that stops you from breaching a contract.  You may have to pay some damages as a result, but you aren't doing anything illegal per se.  So, yes, they should have breached the contracts for the sake of the company and their stockholders.  It would have been the smart business decision.  There are a ton of mitigating circumstances, like the company almost going bankrupt, that would significantly reduce how much AIG would have been expected to pay back in a court of law.  AIG was just plain stupid for doing this!

Furthermore, some of the people who got these bonuses are already paying the bonuses back for the very reasons I listed earlier:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123743055512280701.html

 



We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.  The only thing that really worried me was the ether.  There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke

It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...."  Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson

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Words Of Wisdom on 19 March 2009
akuma587 said:
Words Of Wisdom said:
akuma587 said:
I'm sure all of those people who are currently being paid those bonuses prefer what just happened. Don't be surprised if everyone's name who was paid a bonus is released to the public. This will follow some of these people for the rest of their lives and quite a few of them might lose their jobs.

Is there a reason that you posted again with pretty much the exact same content as your previous post without responding at all to anything I said?  Redundancy is boring.

Why are you just hiding behind contract law?  Do you honestly think that a jury would have been very sympathetic to these people?

Not to mention it was a stupid move for the company financially.  The company probably lost more money because of this fiasco by NOT breaching these contracts than it did by fulfilling them.  Their stock price took a big hit and there image as a company will likely be permanently stained.  Do you think that has no monetary value?  Or less monetary value than some bonuses?

There is no law that stops you from breaching a contract.  You may have to pay some damages as a result, but you aren't doing anything illegal per se.  So, yes, they should have breached the contracts for the sake of the company and their stockholders.  It would have been the smart business decision.  There are a ton of mitigating circumstances, like the company almost going bankrupt, that would significantly reduce how much AIG would have been expected to pay back in a court of law.  AIG was just plain stupid for doing this!

Furthermore, some of the people who got these bonuses are already paying the bonuses back for the very reasons I listed earlier:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123743055512280701.html

 

How am I hiding behind anything?  For what purpose?  I have no idea what your jury comment is about either.  Do those sentences have any actual meaning or are they just fluff?

It wasn't a stupid move, it's their only move.  In order to appease the government, they must not give the bonuses.  In order to fulfill the obligations of contracts with those employees, they must give the bonuses.  The best they can hope for is that their employees will voluntarily forfeit the bonuses which would appease the government and not end in a lawsuit.  The only stupid thing they may have done is only asked for 50% of the bonuses back (thinking that would make the government happy).

And no, breaching their contracts would have been the single most foolish thing the company could do right now.  The last thing a struggling company needs is their executive tier not only leaving, but turning around to sue the company for lost bonuses plus damages plus whatever stipulations are in the contracts under penalty of breach.  To even suggest that course of action alone shows a lack of understanding.