Among the tough things about the current economic collapse, add this to the list: It's hard to pin down someone to scream at.
I'm speaking specifically about AIG, which is short for American International Group Inc., the multinational insurance and investment company that is so huge we're told that if it goes down, civilization goes with it.
AIG reportedly has 74 million customers in 130 countries, 30 million of them right here in the U.S.A. They insure homes, cars, businesses, professional people, airplanes, boats, life, and a lot of other things. On the financial end of the business, they are involved in mutual funds, retirement accounts and, alas, mortgages.
So far, $173 billion in American taxpayer money has gone to bail out AIG and now we're hearing that's not enough.
It hasn't helped that $165 million of that bailout money has been paid out in bonuses to the company's executives — which makes you wonder what kind of bonuses they handed out when the people in charge didn't steer the ship onto the rocks.
Like you, I wanted to be able to give someone at AIG a piece of my mind about that, preferably someone responsible for doling out those bonuses, or better yet, someone who received a bonus.
Now that we own a good-sized chunk of the company, we certainly have the right to yell at somebody.
But putting a face and a name to AIG isn't that easy. At least not here in Utah.
The bigger they are, the harder they are to find.
I tried to call "the nation's biggest insurer" at their office in Salt Lake City. I found out there isn't one. The closest AIG office is in Denver, but when I called there I was transferred to New York City.
From there I was referred to a woman named Heidi Pope, who apparently is AIG's agency sales manager for Utah. But when I got Heidi on the phone, she said "I cannot talk about AIG's local affairs. I am happy to give you the e-mail address of the person who can discuss that with you."
Great, I said, where is that?
"Georgia," said Pope. "I am instructed to refer all questions there."
It is hard to get up front and personal in an e-mail.
Next I went to "Insurance" in the Yellow Pages to see if I could find any Utah brokers or agents who work for AIG. But I couldn't find a single AIG specific listing in the phone book.
Finally I started cold-calling companies that offer many different insurance carriers to see if I could at least find someone who sells AIG.
I eventually found one. In the "J's."
Mike Jackson of Jackson Insurance said sure, he could sell me AIG insurance for my car, although he didn't recommend it because when he ran AIG's quotes against other companies, AIG was only fourth.
"We don't write a lot for them," said Jackson. "But if they're competitive, I'd say go for it. Apparently they're still strong. They've been sending us memos that they're doing awesome and they can pay their claims."
Chad Auble, a customer service representative for Rob Jackson Insurance Agency, said his company also offers AIG insurance.
But he said they recently took down the AIG logo from the office wall on account of the current negative publicity.
"A lot of people don't grasp that AIG insurance and AIG financial aren't the same thing," said Auble. "People would come in and see the AIG placard and wonder if we were stable. So we took it down."
The word on the inside is that AIG's commercial insurance side is healthy and solvent, in sharp contrast to the financial side that got upside down with too many bad sub-prime mortgage portfolios.
The irony, of course, is that a company that is in the business of selling the importance of insuring against catastrophe didn't insure itself against catastrophe.
Jodee Clark, a customer service representative at Perry Richard Insurance in Salt Lake City, another local company that handles AIG, said, "As I understand it, the insurance side is strong. There's several billion in surplus that's reserved just for the insurance that has nothing to do with the other AIG. The insurance side had nothing really to do with the bailout money. That's my impression."
If that's true, then don't blame AIG for AIG's problems. And good luck on finding anyone around here to yell at.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.