New AIG CEO Ready to Walk

Has the AIG (AIG) CEO Robert Benmosche, just three months into the job, had enough? The Wall Street Journal scoops the field this morning with news from inside the AIG board room that Benmosche has informed the board "he is considering stepping down as chief executive of the government-controlled insurer." Benmosche dropped the bomb last week, saying he was "done." According to the Journal's sources, Benmosche "is chafing under constraints imposed by AIG's government overseers, particularly a recent compensation review by the Obama administration's pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg." He's not quite out the door yet, though. He agreed to think over his hasty comments at the behest of a shocked board. The newspaper adds that it's unclear whether Benmosche would really resign so soon, as it's his style to be blunt and "ruffl[e] feathers." But maybe Benmosche, the 65-year-old ex-CEO of MetLife Inc., just wants to return to his Croatian idyll where he spent his first weeks on the job at the teetering insurer, as Reuters reported in August.

Things aren't so turbulent in the boardroom of General Motors. According to the New York Times, GM Chairman Edward E. Whitacre said the carmaker would be able to pay back the billions it was loaned by Uncle Sam and that it "would begin doing so soon."

Score one for Wall Street. Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, the ex-Bear Stearns managers on trial for securities fraud, were acquitted Tuesday, dealing the U.S. government a loss in "its first major criminal trial spawned by the financial crisis," the WSJ reports, adding the loss may impact the Fed's ongoing criminal investigations into Lehman Bros. and AIG. BusinessWeek, in its "Unstructured Finance" blog, argues that Cioffi and Tannin may have won this round, but the damage the duo allegedly did in pumping up the subprime market with collateralized debt obligations is hardly disputed on Wall Street and damaged Citigroup (C) and Bank of America (BAC). "Left unexplored and unanswered for the public is to what extent Cioffi and Tannin were responsible for significant losses at Citigroup and Bank of America. The men were certainly involved," BusinessWeek writes, citing deal documents.

Chris Dodd, Democratic chairman of the Senate banking committee, has unveiled plans to "strip the Federal Reserve of nearly all of its power to oversee banks," writes the Washington Post, leaving it to focus on interest rate (monetary) policy. His idea is to create a "single banking regulator, a powerful council of regulators to monitor systemic risks to the economy and a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to write and enforce rules on products such as mortgages and credit cards," adds the WSJ. While the new proposals would give the White House and Congress some new powers in overseeing banks, it sets up a potential policy war with the Obama administration, "which has argued for the central bank to play a pivotal role in addressing financial threats." How will Fed chief Ben Bernanke counter this broadside? By coming off his academic pedestal and learning the rough and tumble of Capitol Hill politics, suggests the NYT. And what better mentor can he have found than the combustible congressman from Massachussetts, Barney Frank?

The International Energy Agency has published its annual World Energy Outlook and it makes for grim reading writes the NYT. Ahead of next month's (already written-off) UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen, the IEA warns that, "Continuing on today’s energy path, without any change in government policy, would mean rapidly increasing dependence on fossil fuels, with alarming consequences for climate change and energy security." But it's what the agency isn't saying about dwindling oil reserves that has the Guardian interested. It quotes an unnamed "whistleblower" who claims the IEA "has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying."

And finally, federal prosecutors have indicted a gang of cyber thieves accused of perpetrating a year ago the largest ever bank heist in scope, all virtually. The WSJ reports that the U.S. Justice Department indicted the hackers—eight Russian and Eastern Europeans—"alleging they were part of a crime ring that allegedly broke into ATMs in hundreds of cities world-wide and stole $9 million in a matter of hours." In announcing the indictments yesterday, the FBI admitted "more money is stolen electronically or [in] data breaches than through bank robberies."