At AIG, the pounds and dollars simply melt away
Monday, Mar. 2 2009 @ 10:45AM
Even the Dow's plummet this morning pales next to AIG's statistics. Floyd Norris at the New York Times has the funnest fact of the day:
In the fourth quarter, AIG said it lost $61.7 billion.
That amounts to $465,421 per minute. To put that in perspective, every six seconds it loses enough to pay full tuition for a year at Harvard.
Or 50 years of grad school at a state university for your lazy-ass kid who refuses to move out of your basement.
In any case, former AIG CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg shouldn't have to worry. Driven from the giant insuror a few years ago amid an accounting scandal, Hank extracted hundreds of millions of dollars in AIG stock trades he conducted after his ouster. (See my September 17 Press Clips post for details.)
