There's a potentially exciting investment opportunity brewing this week, blending a mix of racial politics, political stagecraft, and the kind of free publicity that every business executive dreams of. I'm talking about the scheduled meeting this Thursday at the White House, when President Obama will sit down with Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police, who arrested Gates in his home one afternoon this month.

You may remember American International Group (AIG). The U.S. government gave it $182 billion of taxpayer money last fall in exchange for a 78 percent stake. Of that money, $165 million went for bonuses to a handful of people in its Financial Products Group (FPG), which sold Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) on which AIG lacked the capital to make good. And $200 million more is slated for those good folks in 2009.

What does America value? The answer is simple: building the biggest and riskiest companies in the world. If you achieve world-class levels of size and risk, the U.S. government will use everything in its power to rescue you if you get into trouble and let you pay yourself billions in bonuses if things are going well. With $23.7 trillion of taxpayer money at risk to bail out those huge institutions -- almost twice U.S. GDP -- there can be no doubt how great the reward is for failing big.