Ya think?

Bloomberg has a story by Erik Holm and Hugh Son:

American International Group Inc., the insurer that vowed to temper spending after hosting a conference at a California resort amid a federal bailout, scrapped a similar event planned for next week at a $400-a-night hotel. The conference, scheduled to be held at the Ritz-Carlton in California's Half Moon Bay, was canceled today "after a re- evaluation of the costs under the new circumstances",' said spokesman Joe Norton. The White House, Congress, and Barack Obama castigated AIG this week for spending $440,000 last month at the St. Regis resort in Monarch Beach.
AIG, which got an $85 billion loan from the U.S. government last month, may access an additional $37.8 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to "replenish liquidity",' the Fed said late yesterday. Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy told Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson yesterday that the company will rethink expenses. "I cannot fathom how in the same day, the very same day that AIG asked the government for another $37.8 billion loan, the company would even consider moving forward with plans to host another large conference at another luxury resort,'' said Representative Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who criticized AIG earlier this week for the cost of the St. Regis conference.
Next week's event at Half Moon Bay, about 30 miles south of San Francisco on the Pacific Ocean, aimed to "motivate and educate'' about 150 independent agents who sell AIG coverage to high-end clients, spokesman Nicholas Ashooh said yesterday. The insurer hosts similar events "around the world all the time,'' he said, as a way to reward self-employed agents. Norton said today he didn't yet know if AIG would cancel plans for other events.
AIG considered buying advertisements to explain its position, only to be told by its public-relations consultant, George Sard, that it would be "a really bad idea. To spend the taxpayer's money on an expensive ad campaign to apologize for how you abused taxpayer money leaves you open to further attacks,'' Sard wrote in an e-mail yesterday to Ashooh. Sard, chief executive officer of New York-based Sard Verbinnen & Co., said the message was a private e-mail mistakenly sent to Bloomberg and wasn't intended to be a public statement. "Whether the company's behavior is wrong on an absolute basis doesn't really matter right now,'' said Heather Elms, a business professor at the Kogod School of Business at American University in Washington. "It's become a question of perception, and it seems that they're being viewed as behaving unethically.''
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino yesterday called "despicable'' expenses from the first gathering, a weeklong conference that began days after the US agreed to give AIG the $85 billion. Those costs included $23,000 for spa services, according to Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, said during this week's debate with Republican candidate John McCain that AIG should repay the U.S. Treasury for the costs of the event. "The Treasury should demand that money back and those executives should be fired,'' Obama said. As part of the loan agreement, AIG agreed to give a 79.9 percent ownership stake of the company to the federal government.
In his letter to Paulson, Liddy said the St. Regis gathering was planned "many months'' before the Fed's initial loan to AIG. Next week's meeting was also planned before the loan, Ashooh said. "This sort of gathering has been standard practice in our industry for many years,'' Liddy wrote. ``Let me assure you that we are reevaluating the costs of all aspects of our operations in light of the new circumstances in which we are all operating.'' Cummings, who earlier this week urged Paulson to crack down on AIG's spending, said the Treasury secretary must "publicly express his adamant commitment to ensuring that not a single penny of taxpayer dollars go toward funding this type of egregious expenditure.''
Receipts provided by Waxman for the earlier conference at the St. Regis were dated 22 through 30 September. AIG agreed to the $85 billion loan from the government on 16 September ceding a 79.9 percent ownership interest to the government.
Vivian Deuschl, a spokeswoman for the Ritz-Carlton, declined to say how much AIG would pay for canceling the Half Moon Bay event, and said there was no across-the-board rule for such fees. "It depends on how far out the meeting was, and other factors,'' she said in an interview.

Rico says it should be beaten out of them, on primetime television...