American Insurance Group

American Insurance Group: Economic historians and Ph.D. candidates will dig deeply into the annals of this economic crisis. The American Insurance Group (AIG) will be the protagonist of the historical-story line. AIG’s risk tolerance, risk analysis, and policy to insure risk could be the root of this economic turmoil.

Rather than elaborate and interpret, I will  list a series of relevant stories. Click on the titles below to read the report on a separate browser page. 

Corporate malfeasance convolutes and distorts the best qualities of a firm and its people.  Many AIG employee stomachs turned sour when learning of AIG’s failing compleasance. In the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’s “fifth Law of Nature, is compleasance; that is to say, “That every man strive to accommodate himselfe (sic) to the rest.”

Hobbes contrasts the man who will adjust himself, his passions, to the larger group with the “man that by asperity of Nature, will strive to retain those things which to himselfe (sic) are superfluous, and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his Passions, cannot be corrected, is to be left, or cast out of Society, as combersome (sic) thereunto.” AIG Corporation may “be left, or cast out of Society, as combersome thereunto.”

Here are your stories; this is not an exhaustive list. 

• Falling Giant:  A Case Study Of AIG by Gregory Gethard
• Jim Crammer Apologizes to AIG Employees
• AIG Employees on Edge as Once-Safe Company in Turmoil
• AIG On The Brink
• Crisis on Wall Street: Questions and Answers On AIG
• Charlie Rose: A Conversation About AIG with Hank Greenberg