AIG Adds Massages to Its Bailout Tab

Just days after receiving an $85 billion loan guarantee from the government, AIG (AIG) threw a week-long retreat at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif. Designed as a reward for top-performing agents, the jaunt cost the company, and by extension U.S. taxpayers, $200,000 for rooms, $150,000 for meals and $23,000 for spa services. Elected officials and many citizens alike are outraged at the extravagant expenditure made at a time the company was close to collapse, essentially surviving on the public dole.

The problem wasn’t the party or the hefty bill. After all, companies make foolish decisions with their assets all the time. As private corporations, that is entirely their right. From buying the naming rights to stadiums (Remember CMGI Field?) to offering in-office massage (another dot-com-era mainstay), it's the responsibility of management to decide how best to allocate capital. As a shareholder, if you don’t like their policies, you are free to dump the stock at any time.

Unfortunately, because government took the fascist step of nationalizing a private business instead of letting it fail, we don’t have the luxury of divorcing ourselves from AIG’s poor business decisions. How their business is run, how they pay their employees, how risk is taken and hedged now have a direct effect on your bottom line — even if you never bought AIG’s stock and have wanted nothing to do with the company at all.

The practical difficulty with “public ownership” is that we now all get a say in how AIG’s business is run, meaning that business decisions are now made by politicians with no industry expertise and zero skin in the game for political purposes. I’ve sold the stocks of companies with bad management dozens of times, but I can’t sell my position in AIG. You'll note that the federal government now says it’ll lend the company an additional $37 billion given its continued capital constraints.

Outraged over $23,000 in spa bills? So am I. But your outrage shouldn’t be directed at the fat cats at AIG, but at the government whose interventionist policies invested our hard-earned tax dollars into the company in the first place.

Last week I mentioned having added to my position in NTT DoCoMo (DCM), a major wireless communications provider in Japan. In an environment where few stocks have held up, including other Japanese names like Toyota (TM), Sony (SNE) and Hitachi (HIT), shares in the mobile phone giant are down a modest 6% year-to-date compared to a 33% drop for the S&P 500.

I’m the first to admit that my interest in Japanese stocks has been expensive, given the reality they’ve been hit hard along with equities across the globe. But DoCoMo’s relative strength, even amid Tuesday’s 9% drop in the Nikkei 225, is hard to ignore. I continue to hold the stock.

Those equally as impressed as I might consider a less volatile but highly correlated alternative in shares of DoCoMo’s parent company, the massive Nippon Telegraph & Telephone (NTT), which holds a 60% stake. Shares, which I also own, have dropped since hitting a 52-week high in August and are down about 10% year to date, far outperforming other large international telecoms such as Deutsche Telekom (DT), AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ).

Before the government got involved in micromanaging and re-regulating every element of finance, this was a strong stock. If they ever decide to get out of the way, it could easily become one again.