Don’t know why it took them so long to open an investigation.
AIG is a public company, and we have strong fraud laws on the books for public companies. In fact, Congress piled some more fraud laws on with Sarbanes-Oxley.
Instead of passing ex post facto bill of attainders and having the president personally demonize these people and send ACORN buses to their houses, we should use the laws on the books in accordance with the Constitution to investigate and punish people in accordance with law.
This is being done to distract attention from the fact that the people Barry attacked did nothing criminal and in fact there was no suggestion that they had done anything criminal in their running of AIG, something that observers commented on at the time.
I certainly think this should be investigated, because fraud is a serious threat and sometimes a serious problem in all huge diversified financial companies; but it’s not the thing that brought down AIG. Barry’s just using this to cover his backside.
Sarbanes-Oxley, btw, is probably a contributing cause of fraud, because it made things so complicated that they became virtually impossible to really control. Even the law’s own authors weren’t clear about the meaning of some of its provisions. I bet you’d find that fraud actually rose within the years after SOX.