American Morning
Minding Your Business
[cnn-photo-caption image= http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/03/16/minding_your_busi_art.jpg caption=" CNN Business Correspondent Christine Romans is Minding Your Business everyday here on amFIX"]
Outrage:
Thousands of you are seeing red over the green bestowed on AIG traders and executives. Incredible and overwhelming response to AM this morning about the taxpayer dollars going to pay hundreds of millions in bonuses to AIG.
Three undeniable facts you keep hammering: the taxpayer owns 80 percent of this company. The company's performance was horrendous and almost brought down the world financial system. No one would be getting a bonus if it weren't for the government rescue. Almost every caller and emailer is demanding these legal contracts be renegotiated.
A Treasury department official says the government's legal analysis shows the bonuses must be legally paid. The President says he wants to try to block them. Millions have already gone out the door. It's all just another ugly example of the mess we are in.
Women on Wall Street
“When I got that tap on the shoulder I just was flabbergasted. I was amazed.”
Brittany Sharpton recalled the day last November when she was laid off from her job as an infrastructure analyst at Citigroup. When the 23-year-old joined the investment firm in 2007 she envisioned rising up through the ranks and becoming a senior manager. Instead, she was handed a pink slip, and according to Sharpton, every woman in her group was let go.
“There was just absolutely no discretion, no regard not only with performance but keeping a generation of women in the group,” Sharpton said.
Susan Antilla, who wrote about sexual discrimination on Wall Street in “Tales from the Boom-Boom Room,” is not surprised. She says historically whenever there’s a recession, women on Wall Street lose their jobs.
“Inevitably, we have downturns, and the downturn comes and whack, they’re gone.”
Attorney goes from the courtroom to the showroom
It almost sounds like the beginning of another bad lawyer joke, but what happened to Paul Semenza is very serious and it's happening to white collar workers across the country.
Semenza practiced law for 25 years as a defense attorney at a small firm near Boston. Last year, he was laid off. The reason: the economy. Semenza was concerned but thought all his years of experience would soon lead to another offer, but it never came. Semenza said, “probably eight or nine months of not being able to get back into a law firm or a company doing litigation work, I decided I can use my skills in other areas."
Semenza finally found work as a salesman at Bob’s Discount Furniture in Saugus, just outside Boston. His pride soon gave way to worry he might not land the job at the discount store. He said, “I thought they would tell me I'm overqualified, and I was afraid that without a sales background they wouldn't accept me, but they did and I'm grateful.”
How to get your stimulus?
You’ve heard a few governors criticize the stimulus as “wasteful spending”. But Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley is so determined the stimulus will work, he wants mayors and other elected officials from across his state to see for themselves.
It's Maryland's response to the question: "where do I get my stimulus?" Come to a workshop, state officials say, and they'll tell you. At one of the workshops, we were surprised to find a standing room only crowd jammed into a packed meeting at the state capital... all vying for a piece of the stimulus action.
That’s where we met Jim Eberhart, the mayor of the small town of Perryville, MD (pop. 5000). He has a sewer project he calls “shovel ready.” The mayor just needs the money.
Governor O’Malley says the open process is a response to Republican critics who’ve blasted the stimulus as wasteful spending. In fact, O’Malley says his state could use a second stimulus.
Psst… don’t tell Washington… where talk of a stimulus 2.0 has slowed a bit.
Hostage to AIG
Outrage and anger are the watchwords in Washington these days, and they’re directed at one company: AIG. That troubled financial firm has already received $173 billion in bailout money to keep it afloat. Now it is handing out $165 million in bonuses to some of the very people whose incompetence led to the worldwide financial crises.
The response has been swift and harsh.
“It’s hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less 165 million dollars in extra pay,” the President said on Monday. “I mean, how do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?”
From Capitol Hill came this from Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): “These bonuses are going to people who screwed this up enormously.” His colleague, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), told CNN that AIG employees “don’t deserve a bonus. They’re lucky to have a job.”
What's On Tap – Tuesday March 17, 2009
Happy Saint Patrick's Day!
It's Day Two of our special CNN series Road to Rescue. We are breaking down this economic crisis and giving you the information you need to survive.
CNN's Personal Finance Editor Gerri Willis is on Twitter today and answering your questions throughout the show. Follow us at twitter.com/amfix.
Here's some of what's on the show today:
- Outrage and anger are the watchwords in Washington when it comes to AIG. And that was before it was revealed that executives of the company that received $173 billion in bailout money is handing out $165 million in bonuses to the very people whose incompetence led to the world-wide financial crises. The government agrees that paying bonuses to AIG executives is outrageous, but they also say their hands are tied because they say these are legal, binding contracts. It's as though the American people are being held hostage to the same people who caused the crisis. But some say, wait a minute. If auto worker unions, who did nothing wrong, are being forced to consider massive givebacks, why can't AIG?
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