Marc Gunther asks:
Do you care who in the government knew about the AIG bonuses, and when they knew it? Do you think the AIG executives who collected bonuses deserve opprobrium? I don’t. Although the $165 (or $218) million in bonuses have become a symbol of executive compensation gone wild, pointing fingers at Tim Geithner or Chris Dodd or some AIG executive who may or may not have done a good job misses the point. It’s a distraction from a more fundamental question, namely: What have the directors of companies like AIG, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch been doing and how can they be held accountable?
Can you name a director of AIG? I didn’t think so.
Marc goes on to name an interesting somebody who until recently was a director of AIG: Richard Holbrooke, who also happens to have been a Friend of Angelo (as in Mozilo, the former CEO of Countrywide). And is now our nation’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I don’t fully buy the blame-the-directors argument. Maybe that’s just because I’m now in my second year as member of a board of directors, the vestry of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan. But I also think it’s a little crazy to expect that part-time directors of a big, complicated corporation like AIG can really act as an effective check on management. Which raises the question: What good is a board of directors?