Vincent Gioia - April 3, 2009

AIG has been in the news a lot these days. At the beginning of the AIG saga the Fed said it was too big to allow it to fail and so billions were given to “save” the company. Of course this failed and still more money was thrown their way. When it was “discovered” that AIG had contractual obligations to give serious bonuses to key employees, congress was irate. Even after it became known that a Democrat, Senator Chris Dodd, inserted a provision in the Stimulus bill to protect these bonuses at the request of the Treasury Department, the jackals that passed, but didn’t read, the bill were still furious.

With all the attention given to AIG I think it is interesting to learn a little more about the company.

First of all, some may be surprised to learn that AIG is a subsidiary of American International Corporation (AIC) and the parent has a most interesting history. AIC has succeeded in remaining invisible and does that by relying on secrecy because that’s how its founders liked it. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., of Robber Baron fame, started the company in 1910. Other Barons of industry joined John D.; Andrew Mellon, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie. Other American industrialists and bankers also joined the AIC venture. The reason such an illustrious group of giants came together was that knew the financial clout they could exert together would bring them even more wealth, but more importantly, power; at a time when there were few government restrictions interfering with business.

Full story

Tags: AIG, Economic Collapse, Robber Barons

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Economy, power elite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.