Your window into the sense of entitlement of our financial betters

From a New York Times article on the TARP inspector general Neil Barofsky's scathing report on the decision to pay off AIG's creditors in full.

Just two days before the New York Fed paid A.I.G.’s partners 100 cents on the dollar to tear up their contracts with the insurance giant, one bank volunteered to take a modest haircut — but it never got the chance.

UBS, of Switzerland, alone offered to give a break to the New York Fed in the negotiations last November over how to keep A.I.G. from toppling and taking other banks down with it. It would have accepted 98 cents on the dollar.

But UBS’s good-faith gesture was quickly drowned out by Goldman Sachs and the top French bank regulator. They argued, with others, that it would be improper and perhaps even criminal to force A.I.G.’s trading partners to bear losses outside of bankruptcy court.

Those are some balls on display. First by UBS, agreeing to take 98 cents on the dollar instead of 100 cents and pretending it is some grand compromise when their assets were worth 40 cents on the dollar, and then by Goldman-Sachs, who claimed that it would be illegal if they didn't get all their money in full. Thankfully they all got every penny that was owed to them. Why? Because Tim Geithner knows how to treat his old bosses. Is there a position higher than Treasury Secretary we can put him in?

What's it that Taibbi said about Goldman-Sachs? "The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money"? He was being too kind.