AIG, AIG.

I wonder what the outrage is about. You give a troubled company a bailout, and what do you expect them to do with the money? Invest it? Yeah, if anyone could make great returns investing in financial products now. Seems like a really bad idea. Keep the money in the bank? Why would they need the money then?

How about paying out bonuses? That sucks. Perhaps paying off debts? That's probably the reason why anyone would need a bailout. To pay your liabilities and avoid being sued into insolvency. So while getting angry at the bonuses is all fine, getting pissed at an insurance company honouring contracts is anaethema to their line of business.

The other thing is calls for mark-to-market to be removed. In university, academics reasoned that accounting reports should not affect the market price. Of course, that's in theory; practically it seems like accounting data matter alot. Anyhow, by asking to scrap the mark-to-market rule, they are essentially asking that ther financial instruments to be valued at historical cost, basically what they got it for, rather than the real market value. Which is the cause of all these problem, isn't it? FIs being overvalued. And the suggestion? To value these overvalued FIs to be at the same value as before. That hardly sounds like it'll work. Perhaps only for the short term.