{mosads}Benmosche, who took over AIG after it received more than $170 billion in federal assistance during the financial crisis, attracted a slew of criticism Tuesday, after he told The Wall Street Journal that the public and political anger directed at his company when it planned to pay out millions of dollars in bonuses while on a government lifeline was “just as bad” as lynch mobs.
The 2009 controversy, in which both parties were hotly critical, were “intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with pitch forks and their hangman nooses. … Sort of like we did in the Deep South. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.”
Benmosche later walked back those remarks, calling them a “poor choice of words.”
In the interview, Benmosche argued that public “ignorance” helped spur the outrage over roughly $175 million in bonuses the company paid out to employees. He pointed out that while bonuses typically represent a reward of sorts in most fields, employees in the financial sector rely on annual bonuses for a substantial portion of their income.
“It’s core compensation,” he said.