I propose he is. This is what happens when you over pay people for abusing the system. They begin to believe they are actually honorable. And deserve the spoils of their collective crimes. No, I'm no raging lefty, but each and every employee who worked for AIG bears some responsibility for the abuse there. This clown DeSantis claims 'it wasn't me'. That's what they all say.
I do find it pretty hard to believe that nobody else in the FP division knew about the CDS' being written and the potential for disaster that they posed besides the people directly involved. I think this is a case of while the good times are rolling and bonuses are big I'll put my head in the sand.
i think it is great that he did this and i hope everyone else resigns and then the losses to AIG magnify 3x and we can all rue the day we asked amatuers to unwind big positions. maybe we'd even get some good size market orders out think of all the money we'd get to make off of those fools, and we'd get to keep some of it after taxes likely as well.
Mr. DeSantis, I feel your pain...I don't work at AIG, so I was even further removed from the handful of individuals who razed your company. You are upset at being asked to return your bonus (an amount of $$ that the average American would have had to work 10 or even 20 years to earn); I am equally pissed about being asked to throw money into the kitty to pay your bonus. Oh, wait, I wasn't asked whether I would like to contribute. I am doing my patriotic duty. Maybe you should have quietly done the same. Maybe its the whole "me first" and "screw everyone else as long as I get mine" attitude, exhibited by financial firms up and down Wall Street, emblematic of this entire financial crisis, that has people angry at you and your peers. Am I naive? I always thought bonuses were paid to allow and encourage employees to participate in the success of their company. If your company isn't successful, then why in god's name would you expect a bonus? Do you deserve that bonus any more than any of the millions of unemployed US workers deserve their paychecks? Most of those people had nothing to do with AIG blowing up either, yet somehow we are all paying the price. Had the US Gov't not stepped in, Mr. DeSantis, you and your peers would not have been villified; you would have been mourned like the poor SOB's at Lehman. Maybe you would have preferred that option. Mr. DeSantis, if you truly follow through with your "threat" of giving your bonus to charity, I applaud you for that. I hear the US Treasury is taking donations.
Any decent CDS/structured credit derivatives trader can sit down, analyze the books for a few weeks with an AIG consultant, and begin to help unwind the remaining $1.6 trillion just fine. The "they are terribly complex contracts" Liddy story you've been sold on is just smoke and mirrors in an attempt to keep the home team on the job = retention bonuses. There are plenty of capable traders out there looking for a job.
Well, put it this way. If their bets went right and those CDS paid out like bandits, will he benefit from it? Yes. Will he turn those bonus down, No. In fact, as a VP, he will probably benefit the most. So, his argument of not knowing about those bets yet he will benefit fully from them are nonsense.
these contracts can be very difficult to 1/ understand and 2/ unwind. One of the businesses AIG was very much in was business of credit enhancement/reinssurance of CDOs and MBSs and other credit structured transactions. The credit enhancement of these CDOs can be extremely complex depending on the terms of the CDO (is it a blackbox CDO, is the CDO collateralised by AAA assets that can themselves be AAA CDOs (or were at the time)). Saying it would be easy to unwind the book is not true unless you are willing to take maximum loss. If you want to try to extract some value out of the unwind, it could be a very lenghty and meticulous process.
Sure... though complicated, they aren't *that* complicated to someone who's been on a structuring desk for awhile. But - why the hell would you, if you were that man with the experience to manage the books - do it for a middle tier salary, no bonus prospects, and risk of being lynched? And even if DeSantis did know that there's a structured book there doing odd bets, it's not his jurisdiction. He trades a completely different product, in a completely different division. Think how you would feel if all of a sudden your stock trading pnl is getting sliced because a bunch of fx traders who happen to live next door to you blew up their account.
I guess no one here knows (or wants to know) the difference between a performance bonus and a retention bonus.