Thomas Russo, the Secret Scribe of AIG

Thomas Russo, the Secret Scribe of AIG

I found this article most enlightening and thought
I would pass it on here at ATS. This article is from
an insider's perspective of Wall Street, an AIG Exec.

Mr. Russo is a worried man. Between the pressing need for stimulus spending to save a withering economy, and the medium-term need to deal with gargantuan federal and municipal debt, not to mention trillions of dollars of off-balance-sheet obligations to Medicare and Social Security, "the problems the U.S. faces are, in some sense, insurmountable," he writes.

MR. RUSSO IS livid about the dark future, but not about Wall Street's hand in having shaped it. He puts the phrase "bailouts" in scare quotes, dismissing the hubbub. "Yes," he writes, "it would have been far worse had the government failed to act."

but Mr. Russo does not state what would have happened
in his far worse scenario nor why it became the taxpayer's
responsibility to bail-out Wall Street.

And also, off-balance-sheet obligations?
Isn't that illegal to cook the books?
How is the regular Joe responsible
for that?

www.observer.com...