GAO found that 40 executives for 10 companies received approximately $350 million in pay and other compensation in the years leading up to the termination of their companies’ underfunded pension plans. GAO identified salaries, bonuses, and benefits provided to small groups of high-ranking executives at these companies during the 5 years leading up to the termination of their pension plans. For example, beyond the tens of millions in base salaries received, GAO found that executives also received millions of dollars in stock awards, income tax reimbursements, retention bonuses, severance packages, and supplemental executive-only retirement plans.

The Federal Reserve — the quasi-autonomous body that controls the US’s money supply — is a “Ponzi scheme” that created “bubble after bubble” in the US economy and needs to be held accountable for its actions, says Eliot Spitzer, the former governor and attorney-general of New York.

Bernard Madoff, the self-confessed author of the biggest financial swindle in history, was sentenced to the maximum 150 years behind bars for what his judge called an “extraordinarily evil” fraud that shook the nation’s faith in its financial and legal systems and took “a staggering toll” on rich and poor alike.

The former top executive of American International Group Inc. plundered an AIG retirement program of billions of dollars because he was angry at being forced out of the company, a lawyer for AIG told jurors Monday at the start of a civil trial. Attorney Theodore Wells told the jury in Manhattan that former AIG Chief Executive Officer Maurice “Hank” Greenberg improperly took $4.3 billion in stock from the company in 2005, after he was ousted by the company amid investigations of accounting irregularities.