Misuse Of Bailout Money, Bailouts | featured news

President Obama said Wednesday that no one in his administration had been responsible for supervising ailing insurance giant AIG but that ultimately, the buck stops with him.

The chief executive officer of failed insurance conglomerate AIG acknowledged Wednesday that the company's multimillion-dollar bonuses were "distasteful" to many and had provoked a firestorm of wrath.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is not a lawyer, nor does he play one on TV. So when just about every question at Tuesday's afternoon briefing concerned bonuses at insurance giant AIG, Gibbs had a non-answer at the ready. "I'm not a contracts lawyer," he said at one point, later explaining that he was "not a contract lawyer," either. When asked whether the president could simply deny more money to AIG unless it scrapped bonuses, he repeated: "Again, I'd refer you to a contract lawyer, which I'm not one."

President Barack Obama declared Monday that insurance giant American International Group is in financial straits because of "recklessness and greed" and said he intends to stop it from paying out millions in executive bonuses.

Insurance giant reveals it paid more than $75B in taxpayer dollars in the final months of 2008 to numerous banks, as well as U.S. municipalities.

The Obama administration sought to reduce the bonuses, but the insurer, which received more than $170 billion in aid, said it was obligated to pay them.

Bernanke accuses company of exploiting gaps in the system, says government 'had no choice' on bailout.

The New York Attorney General's office has subpoenaed Bank of America to submit a list of employees who got bonuses and the amounts that the employees received, a spokesman for the New York Attorney General said on Thursday.

Wall Street bankers, with their $18 billion in bonuses, private jets and gaudy conferences, are causing headaches for the GOP.

President Obama has proposed capping compensation for executives at banks that take taxpayer bailout money at $500,000. Republicans hate the idea, which puts them uncomfortably on the side of people currently about as popular as child-porn producers and subprime mortgage brokers.

Lawmakers and consumer groups skewered the San Francisco bank, which got a $25-billion infusion from the government, after they heard about the event to fete top mortgage salespeople.

Cries for post-bailout accountability resounded at the biggest banks Tuesday as Citigroup Inc. issued a 43-page defense of its lending, a consumer group lashed Bank of America Corp. for throwing a $10-million Super Bowl bash, and Wells Fargo & Co.