We’ve been systematically watching the shoes fall at AIG, thanks to our users’ passionate stories, votes and comments.    Our last post looked at AIG relative to a number of Vanno reputation bottom-dwellers, and we wondered when AIG was going to join them.   Well, it’s happened, so we thought we’d document the decline and correlate it to the events of the last six months. 

 This graph shows the downward trend in AIG’s reputation over the six months we’ve been up and running, along with the most popular AIG-related stories.    It’s interesting to see how individual events combined to affect reputation.    The realization that AIG had burnt through most of the initial bailout money and needed more conspired with tales of luxury junkets to hammer the company’s reputation in the Nov. 2008 timeframe.   Subsequent revelations about ongoing lobbying and support for anti-labor legislation, however, only exerted modest additional downward pressure.

The coup de grace was the perfect storm of “retention bonuses” and the fact that much of the bailout money given to AIG went to other banks – including a number of foreign ones – to pay derivative-related insurance polices at 100 cents on the dollar.

And just how far has AIG fallen?    Essentially to the bottom of our 5800 company index.  As the graph below illustrates, AIG is now ranked with the likes of Halliburton, IndyMac Bancorp and Chrysler.