Quote of the day

From today's Washington Post story on e-mails from inside AIG during that whole period where they were destroying the world economy, comes a little gem from AIGFP executive Tom Athan on how much fun he wasn't having.

In late July, Goldman Sachs, one of the firm's largest trading partners, challenged Financial Products' numbers, asserting that Goldman's calculations showed a significant drop in the swaps' value. That drop, Goldman contended, triggered provisions in the swaps contracts requiring AIG to post hundreds of millions of dollars in collateral to protect Goldman against the apparent escalation in risk.

"They are not budging and are acting irrational," Tom Athan, a Financial Products executive, wrote on Aug. 2 to Forster after a tense conference call with Goldman employees.
...
Athan added, "This isn't what I signed up [for]. Where are the big trades, high fives and celebratory closing dinners you promised?"

Awwww, poor baby. The man signed up for lobster and caviar in the champagne room and and he got was obscenely rich off schemes that bankrupted the planet, the repercussions of which he then had actually deal with as part of his job. Oh the indignity! Oh the unfairness!

Perhaps it has just slipped my mind, but is there anyone in the whole financial and banking industries that has come off looking... well I won't say 'good', but looking reasonably like something that resembles a human being and not some sort of cold blooded, underground dwelling reptoid creature that feasts on misery and toddlers that accidentally stray too far from their parents? I'm not asking for much, perhaps an executive who killed himself and mentioned the word "shame" in his suicide note or a Goldman-Sachs rep who gave a homeless guy in excess of a dollar while cameras were rolling. Something, because otherwise I'm thinking there isn't one.