The Battle Over Compensation At AIG

Well worth your time, the 6,400-word cover story of this week's New York magazine takes you, among other places, inside the meeting between pay czar Kenny Feinberg and AIG CEO Bob Benmosche that prompted Bob to tell the AIG board, "I'm just about ready to hit the road ... Feinberg stabbed me in the back.”

The piece also gives you a little background about why the man with the St. Tropez tan is now being paid more than $10 million to run AIG (hint: Uncle Sam and bad publicity ran ex-chief Ed Liddy into the ground) and why Goldman Sachs has gotten off easy.

Mainly, though, the piece addresses this question: Should the remaining traders at AIG Financial Products Corp. be paid the millions that their contracts say they should make in light of the state of their employer?

On the one hand, according to an AIG trader quoted in the piece, "If people are angry about the arsonists, it’s not a good idea to go out and shoot the firemen. There were over 40,000 positions on our books, and less than 125 of them blew up the company."

And on the other (the hand I'd play), according to a senior official at the U.S. Treasury, "You could be defensive coordinator of a football team, and if your offense can’t score points, you're not getting any playoff money."

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak