Quote from Mvic:
How can you say that after the $billions that AIG has received to keep it afloat. Let them lose the traders to a firm that hasn't been so incompetently managed that they can't afford to pay their own stars.
I too know people on the street who are going through tough times and I don't wish their lot on anyone and have nothing against people making money for their hard work, and am all for talent being rewarded. However, why should a firm as incompetently managed as AIG get to keep some of the best talent just because they are getting a governemnt check (they shouldn't even be in business at this point!). Its like in soccer, a team that is very well managed will have the cash to have the best talent, the teams with incompetent management will have to settle for the cheaper talent. This free market dynamic is what eventually forces bad management out and new management in. If you don't have that dynamic you have the old soviet style inertia where incompetents remain at their post until they die or are no longer supported by the state.
Don't you see this is not about punishing some poor trader that has worked his ass off but about not rewarding managment incompetence, and in the larger macro sense economic inefficiency