Bank executives go on holiday

Let me get this straight. AIG just hosted a $440,000 retreat at the St. Regis in Monarch Beach for its senior executives just days after receiving $85 billion in a taxpayer-funded bailout. (Consumer Confidential, Oct. 9). Wachovia, teetering on the brink of financial ruin as attorneys for Citigroup and Wells Fargo duked it out, would also receive taxpayer money and yet sent its top brokers on an all-expense-paid cruise to the Greek Isles. Their justification: “This is one way that we recognize our top financial advisors.”

Recognition for what? Excessive greed, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, extreme poor judgment and criminal mismanagement of business funds? Desperate times call for desperate measures: book a few rooms at the local Embassy Suites or Holiday Inn, schedule a round of miniature golf and cap off the night with a roaring bonfire at the beach (you might need someone to stake out a fire pit earlier in the day). That should save taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars and the CEOs of these corporations from a public lynching.

Maylene Holmes

Las Flores

--

Well done on the ugly story David Lazarus wrote. (Consumer Confidential, Oct. 9) Outraged? Of course we’re outraged. This is insensitive, inappropriate, inexplicable behavior on Wachovia’s and AIG’s part. Because of this fiasco we find ourselves in, which we had nothing to do with -- I’m 69, have no debts, I’m down more money in my retirement accounts than I can stand to think about, still working in a feeble attempt to stabilize these accounts (was going to retire next fall) -- I would like revenge and justice!!

So would my partner, Mike, who is in the same predicament. Keep up on this topic. Maybe your future columns could be about what we, collectively, could do about this.

P.S.: Could they go to a Marriott instead? Cruise the Great Lakes? Bolster poor Michigan’s economy instead of spending money on a cruise to a European country.

Judy Rizzo

and Mike Ayotte

Laguna Woods