Inside Job Transcript - Final Version - 9.30.10 - Sony Pictures Classics

Inside Job transcript – Sony Pictures – September 2010 58
NARRATOR: O'Neal's successor, John Thain, was paid 87 million dollars in 2007; and
in December of 2008, two months after Merrill was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, Thain
and Merrill's board handed out billions in bonuses.
In March of 2008, AIG's Financial Products Division lost 11 billion dollars. Instead of
being fired, Joseph Cassano, the head of AIGFP, was kept on as a consultant – for a
million dollars a month.
02:19:55.27
MARTIN SULLIVAN: And you want to make sure that the key players and the key, key
employees, uh, within AIGFP; yeah, we retain that intellectual knowledge.
02:20:03.18
DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN: I attended a very interesting, uh, dinner, organized by
Hank Paulson, a little more than one year ago; uh, with some officials and a couple of,
uh, CEOs from the biggest, uh, banks in the U.S. And uh, surprisingly enough, all these
gentlemen were arguing, uh, we were too greedy; so we have part responsibility. Fine.
And then they were turning to the treasurer, to the secretary of the Treasury, and say,
you should regulate more, because we are too greedy, we can't avoid it. The only way
to avoid this is to have more regulation.
02:20:34.03
CHARLES FERGUSON: I have spoken to many bankers about –
DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN: Um hm.
CHARLES FERGUSON: – this question, including very senior ones. And uh, this is the
first time that I've ever heard anybody say that they actually wanted their compensation
to be regulated –
DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN: Yeah, because it was at the moment where they were
afraid. And uh, after, when solution to the crisis began to appear, then probably they,
they changed their mind.
02:21:00.06
NARRATOR: In the U.S., the banks are now bigger, more powerful, and more
concentrated than ever before.