Friday, August 21, 2009

Inaugural Members of the Hall of Uncouth

I was recently thinking that if my blog had a Hall of Uncouth, this guy would be in it, on the basis of covering finance from a hater's point of view:

The recently-crowned head of international financial embarrassment AIG, Robert Benmosche, has launched a campaign to “restore morale” to his beleaguered employees, who are apparently a) cracking under the strain of public anger and b) having performance anxiety that may be linked to a fear that they will never again be allowed to make obscene and undeserved bonuses, so long as the taxpayer is writing their checks.

This is very sad, no doubt, and must be a terrible burden for anyone working on Wall Street to have to bear. So into the breach steps Benmosche, who became CEO of the firm last month. His new public mantra is that what happened to AIG isn’t the fault of AIG, but rather the fault of the government regulators who allowed AIG to destroy itself and iceberg the hull of the American economy. This is how he put it:

“It’s time the people in Congress stopped talking about you as the problem, because you’re the solution,” he said. “It’s not your fault, it’s their fault, it’s the regulators’ fault.”

In reporting this story Bloomberg, following this quote, did not immediately add a phrase like, “Benmosche after uttering this appalling horseshit quickly stepped sideways so as to avoid the lightning bolt that rained down from the heavens, frying to a crisp two senior executives and the company’s communications chief, Christine Pretto.”


It also occurred to me that someone who refuses to patiently and mildly indulge any species of paranoid rambling is also quite uncouth. Notably this guy. One more time for fun:


Ladies and gents, your inaugural class of the Hall of Uncouth. Congratulations to Matt Taibbi and Barney Frank, the first of many

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