If you remember news footage of people walking into the corporate offices only to walk out with cardboard boxes of personal items then that was A.I.G.

Now, “Hank” has moved on to C.V. Starr & Co, Inc. and he’s apparently looking to make some of the same business deals that helped underwrite the most colossal failure of capitalism ever.  He’s hired 13 former A.I.G. employees away (as of this writing) but C.V. Starr does not, as yet, have a financial products division (the group that handles the securitization of asset backed debt or CDO’s).

So if you’re not used to how this affects you and me here’s the kicker.  “Hank” sets up securitized items (CDO’s) which he then leverages to the hilt via Credit Default Swaps (CDS’s), thus generating opaque layers of legal securities that mask the inherent risk of catastrophic failure the instant that broker-dealers stop lending to one another and start asking questions about the underlying value of the things we’re investing in.  He gets booted by his board of directors, we bail out A.I.G. (a company that appeared to be one of the wealthiest in the whole world) and get stuck with $150 billion investment that’s worth almost nothing.  Meanwhile, A.I.G.’s “braintrust” jumps ship, takes enormous signing bonuses from “Hank,” C.V. Starr & Co, Inc and any number of other insurers/investment banks and the odds that A.I.G. isn’t going to be worthless or that we’ll ever see our $150 billion again is totally gone.

Just thought I’d share with you that the folks who orchestrated this aren’t chastised nor chagrined at it; they’re simply moving on to other companies so that they can do it all over again.

I don’t understand why it is in the taxpayers’ best interests for us to be punitive in regard to TARP recipients.

Here’s my answer.  Taking public funds of the magnitude that financial corporations and car makers took (e.g. multi-billion dollar loans that are becoming hand-outs with no securitization), should be prejudicial.  If the burden is too heavy on those institutions and they lose their “best and brightest” to other institutions like Goldman-Sachs because Sachs was able to generate enough non-underwritten capital so that they could pay back the TARP loan then those weaker institutions should fold.  They should go under.  Capitalism is, to some reasonable degree, the survival of the fittest, not the survival of the top 30,000 financiers regardless of the quality of the product they produce.  If AIG, Bank of America or CitiGroup are poorly managed to the point that it cannot pay competitive wages and bonuses vis~a~vis JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs then let the best and brightest of AIG, Bank of America and CitiGroup flood JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.  You know what will happen?  JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs will realize that they can get rid of their worst producers and pickup better talent, perhaps for even less.  THAT is how capitalism works in every other industry in the westernized world.  You must stay lean.  You must reinvent yourself, your business, your services to stay competitive in capitalism. 

I’m in full support of what some might call punitive bonus slashing.  Instead of Bank of America handing out $26 billion in bonuses in 2009, let them hand out less than half that amount.  I still think $13 billion is more than most people get for doing as poor a job as the financial industry has done.  If the employees of the companies affected by this policy don’t like it, let them fight it out in the halls of those banks who realistically have the funds to pay them instead of us shoring up the weaker banks so that they can barely retain folks who might not be able to cut it at better institutions.

For these funds I’m not applying a criterion of faith/world view of the agency or its directorship.  Any agency that directly brings the life of an individual, family or community up to a basic level of health, education and opportunity is an option but I do want to understand their expense structure and World Vision’s 86% passthrough to the individual/community is a high mark.  I’m also looking into Oxfam International but I don’t have their expense and efficiency yet.

Criteria:

• Agency must act internationally
• A high percentage of funds should reach the individual/family/community
• I prefer a low expense for leadership and staff (not just a low percentage but officers making less than a quarter of a million dollars USD is preferential)
• Review of individual(s)/family/community affected and what’s being done with photos or video of the people and the changes

If you have ideas, agencies for me to check out or metrics by which I can evaluate an agency, please e-mail me with that information.

My current NAS is 95% full and the lack of free space is slowing down access (I’m sure there are some badly fragmented files but I can’t defrag it until I free up more space).

I’m considering the following storage options:

• Western Digital (the drive mfg I tend to use) My Book World Edition II ($290)
  This option will put about 2Tb of NAS on the network but has little upgradability other than attaching other external drives to it via USB 2.0.
• D-Link Network Storage Enclosure ($90.85 + price of two hard drives)
  This looks pretty good but again, it’s limited
  They also have a slightly enhanced model, the 323.
• HP 1Tb MediaSmart Server EX475 ($280 + price of two hard drives)
  Now this is more like it but I’m leery of the Windows Home Server concept. 

I’m still looking around and comparing options.  It looks like any decent solution will cost me around $300 – 350.  Let me know if you have any ideas I should look into.

This is another reminder (I’m included as well) to be vigilant.

• Keep separate passwords for different sites (e.g. – Google/Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.)
• Include a mixture of lowercase, uppercase, numerals and, if the site supports it, a special character or two (e.g. – #, !, $, etc.)
• Change your passwords on a regular basis.
  One idea might be to change your passwords once a month, on payday or at least as often as you remember.  If you have to carry around a list of different passwords then that’s better than using all the same passwords and never changing them.