20 | November | 2014 | New Economic Perspectives

Daily Archives: November 20, 2014

Note to Dudley: Everyone Questions the NY Fed’s Motives – For Good Reasons

Posted on November 20, 2014 by William Black | 4 comments

By William K. Black
San Francisco, CA: November 20, 2014

The NY Fed and Goldman have combined again to produce fingers scraping on a moral blackboard. The story is – not – told coherently in a NY Times piece.

I’ll comment on only two aspects of the incoherent story. First, contrary to the NYT portrayal of the story, there is typically no ambiguity about whether regulatory information is confidential and there was no ambiguity about the particular information that we read (albeit, not in the NYT) that the NY Fed employee leaked to his former colleague after he joined Goldman Sachs.

Second, the NY Fed’s head, William Dudley’s, response to the latest scandal was “I don’t think anyone should question our motives.” I will argue that given the NY Fed’s intolerable institutional conflicts of interest, and the defense of continuing that conflict by the NY Fed’s leadership, e.g., Dudley, everyone should the regional Feds’ motives.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, goldman sachs, NY fed, nyt

Cochrane Demands that the Public Unilaterally Disarm while the Banksters Loot

Posted on November 20, 2014 by William Black | 2 comments

By William K. Black
San Francisco, CA: November 19, 2014

(I’m participating in the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology. I presented Wednesday on a panel honoring the 75^th anniversary of Edwin Sutherland’s announcement of the concept of white-collar crime.)

John Cochrane has written an article with an initial sentence that should spark broad agreement: “confiscating wealth is ultimately about political power.” The banksters who led the frauds that caused the financial crisis “confiscate[ed]” immense wealth from the public and “their” firms’ customers, creditors, and shareholders. They did so with nearly complete impunity, which is “ultimately about political power,” indeed it defines the extraordinary nature of their power. The banksters’ confiscation of wealth has caused a dramatic increase in inequality, which has exacerbated the banksters’ domination of the levers of power. In a prior article, Cochrane stated that the financial crisis was driven by runs on financial institutions and that the runs were typically driven by elite accounting fraud.