AIG CEO Compares Outrage Over Bonuses to Lynchings

AIG CEO Robert Benmosche, who took over after the insurance giant’s historic collapse in 2008, compared the anger over AIG bonuses to the lynchings of African Americans in the South by white supremacists.

“The uproar over bonuses was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses, and all that — sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago],'” Benmosche told the Wall Street Journal. “‘And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.”

AIG paid out $450 million in bonuses in 2009, after receiving a $173 billion government loan to save it from going under, causing significant public outrage.

Washington Post’s Ezra Klein noted that Bemosche’s sentiment was spiritually in line with numerous complaints he heard following the financial collapse, albeit using a slightly different historical analogy. Back then, Klein wrote, CEOs felt they were being singled out like Jews in Germany.

“That’s the context of Benmosche’s comment,” Klein wrote. “I would bet he’s made the same point a number of times in private rooms to appreciative nods. When you say and hear that kind of thing often enough, however, you forget how insane and offensive it is—and then you say it to the Wall Street Journal.”

[h/t BI, WaPo]

[Image via Reuters]

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