An AIG Executive Votes With His Feet

I figured that this would happen; no, I'm being a little dishonest. I hoped this would happen. I wrote earlier about a dream sequence I had in which the Brahmin of Wall Street just packed up and quit, leaving to Tim Geithner and his Treasury Department bureaucrats the job of cleaning up the global financial crisis without their help. By this action (and the concomitant fall of the financial system) they would show class envious Americans who value their skills and talents not at all, just how wrong they were.

In an action not far removed from this dream sequence, Jake DeSantis, Executive Vice President of AIG's Financial Products Division has quit, and his letter of resignation points to his boss's lack of support in front of Congressional lynch mobs seeking to vilify DeSantis and his fellow workers. Coming up through the commodities arm of AIG, DeSantis had no play in the parts of AIG that were bringing the company down...a key graph follows:

"The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.-F.P. because of those losses. In this way I have personally suffered from this controversial activity — directly as well as indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers."

So a guy who did the right things, played by the rules, worked hard and then came into the failure part of the business to help save it--is now quitting. Jake DeSantis seems like a pretty good guy, and he seems like the kind of guy I want at AIG helping them get out of their own way. Instead, he'll now go to a company that isn't in trouble, and he'll help them get ever bigger and richer. C'est la vie, right?