Summers: AIG Bonuses Are "Outrageous"
National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers talks about AIG spending hundreds of millions in bailout money on executive bonuses on CBS' "Fact The Nation."
Summers: "If we simply throw up our hands, refuse to deal with any of this, we'll have the kind of financial catastrophe that we saw after what happened at Lehman Brothers," Summers said. "[Treasury] Secretary Geithner has negotiated very forcefully with AIG. He has done everything that is legally permissible for the government to do to limit the payment of bonuses. But where there are contracts, binding contracts that were entered into long before the government put any money in to AIG -- we're not a country where contracts just get abrogated willy-nilly."
