Monthly Archives: February 2015

Irish-Style Banking Inquiry into the 2008 Financial Crisis

NEP’s Bill Black on The Real News Network discussing his recent testimony in Ireland for a banking inquiry and the challenges the country faces in acknowledging its financial crisis. Video is below. For the transcript, click here.

The Millennials’ Money Pt. 1

By J.D. Alt

The ebook Diagrams & Dollars has been a top-seller on Amazon (in the category “macroeconomics”) for over a year now. There have been many requests for a paper-back version. In deciding to undertake that mission, I started to expand the original long essay into something that would be more book-like in length—and before I knew it, the effort morphed into something else: a different “frame” for the whole argument. The new “frame” evolved as I was reading Millennial Momentum by Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, which views U.S. history from the perspective of a repetitive cycle of four archetypal generations. Every eighty years or so, this cycle repeats, beginning with a “civic” generation—and each of these “fourth turnings” (as they are referred to in the book) is accompanied by dramatic, traumatic, social upheaval. When the upheaval is finally resolved, the “civic” generation is firmly in control, and things settle down, but with a dramatically changed social structure. The “civic” generation that is now leading us into the next “fourth turning” are the Millennials—the children of the baby-boomers—and they now, specifically, are the target audience for the book.

Before I complete—or even decide to publish—the book, I’d be grateful for feedback and responses to some key sections of it. With that in mind, this is the first of several posts presenting these key sections for comment by the NEP readers.

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The Spanish Launch of Modern Money Theory

By L. Randall Wray

Sorry, I’ve been very busy in recent weeks, finishing up a book on Minsky and revising my Modern Money Primer for a second edition (more on both of those projects later).

Meanwhile, Lola Books is gearing up to release the Primer in Spanish next week. I’ll be in Madrid for the launch and for a series of meetings. I’ll give two presentations that are open to the public. Details are below. Hope to see our Spanish friends there!

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Iceland’s Supreme Court Upholds Jail Sentences of Four Banking Executives

Edition of the Bill Black Report at The Real News discussing the good news that Iceland’s Supreme Court upheld the jail sentences that were handed down to four banking executives in that country. The video is below. If you would like the transcript, it is available here

Remember When Carmen Segarra Exposed the NY Fed’s Refusal to Stop Goldman Sachs and Banco Santander’s Scam to Inflate Santander’s Capital? How’d that Work Out?

By William K. Black

On September 30, 2014 I wrote an article to explain the true significance (and horrific analysis by the NY Fed and much of the media) of Carmen Segarra’s key disclosure. My title was “A ‘Perfectly Legal’ Scam is Perfectly Unacceptable to Real Bank Supervisors.” Segarra was the NY Fed examiner who was fired for her criticisms of Goldman Sachs. Segarra was part of the group of new examiners hired as a result of the NY Fed’s admission that it had failed utterly under Timothy Geithner and that the failure had helped make possible the financial crisis. Segarra was part of the new crew that was supposed to radically vitalize the NY Fed’s broken supervisory arm. (Notice that I did not say “revitalize” – the NY Fed has always been Wall Street’s Fed bank, not America’s. It has never been an effective supervisor.)

The point I made was how similar the scam that Goldman crafted to reduce Banco Santander’s capital requirement was to the scam that Lehman used to reduce its capital requirement and pretend that it was healthy when it was deeply insolvent. The key thing that Segarra disclosed was that Mike Silva, her NY Fed boss, claimed that Lehman’s failure caused a “Road to Damascus” conversion that transformed him from a regulatory weakling into the big banks’ worst nightmare – a tough bank supervisor. I showed that, in reality, he did nothing when he learned of Goldman’s scam. The pathetic scope of his conversion is that he now understood that what Goldman and Santander were doing was unethical and endangered the global financial system, but remained unwilling to stop, try to stop, or even criticize Goldman and Santander’s scam.

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HSBC CEO: My Pay Was so Outrageous I Had to Use Tax Havens to Hide it from My Peers

By William K. Black
Quito, Ecuador: January 23, 2015

Greetings from Quito, where I will be spending four months teaching at IAEN about effective regulation and building ties with UMKC.

The latest twists on the latest HSBC tax evasion and tax avoidance scandal is that it has come out that Stuart Gulliver, HSBC’s head, put his money where his mouth wasn’t. He personally used double tax havens – Panama plus Switzerland – to hide his income and wealth from view because his pay was so outrageous that even other HSBC executives would have been outraged by it. The New York Times’ account of this tale demonstrates that Gulliver needs to fire Gulliver as his spokesperson.

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Go Canadians!

Canadian whistleblower’s testimony leads to multi-billion dollar settlement

Article by Krysia Collyer and cross posted from globalnews.ca

For more than five years –big U.S. banks have been under scrutiny for their part in the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. – America’s largest bank- is no different. For its part in the crash – the bank made an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to payout $13 billion to atone for misleading investors.

“I was completely caught off guard by the settlement,” says a former JPMorgan employee.

That’s Canadian-born, Alayne Fleischmann. She worked for JPMorgan as a transaction manager. Her job was to review and find the red flags in home loans the bank wanted to purchase from a mortgage lender.

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The Worst Article Title by an Economist about the Crisis

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: February 19, 2015

This column discusses the most embarrassing title of an economic study of the U.S. financial crisis. It rivals the most embarrassing title of an economic study of the Icelandic crisis.

“The 2010 Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job tells how [Frederic] Mishkin changed the name of the study from ‘Financial Stability in Iceland’ to ‘Financial Instability in Iceland’ on his curriculum vitae.”

Geetesh Bhardwaj of AIG Financial Products and Rajdeep Sengupta, a St. Louis Fed economist, entitled their September/October 2008 article: “Where’s the Smoking Gun? A Study of Underwriting Standards for US Subprime Mortgages.”

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What’s Wrong with David Leonhardt’s NYT Piece on Inequality?

By Pavlina Tcherneva

The New York Times made waves this week with another piece on inequality, saying that it has not risen since 2007. The article was based on this paper by GWU’s Stephen Rose.

The article also suggests that expansions are not a good way of looking at trends in inequality (as I have done in the past, also covered by the NYT). Instead, one needs to look at the business cycle. It also concludes that, thankfully, because of government tax and transfer policies, inequality has not been “that bad” over the last few years and governments can clearly do something about it.

So what’s wrong with this picture?

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Greece wants to save Europe, but can it persuade Europeans?

By Pavlina Tcherneva
Cross posted from aljazeera.com

Most analysis of the Greek debt crisis ignores an important reality: While Greece may be the villain du jour, every eurozone nation is profoundly short of cash. That’s because of a well-acknowledged, but not fully appreciated, flaw at the heart of eurozone financial architecture that converted a historically unprecedented number of nations from issuers of their own currency to users of a common currency.

Greece is simply the first country to experience the extreme consequences of that loss of monetary sovereignty. With no independent source of funding, no currency of its own, no central bank to guarantee its government liabilities, it has had to ask others for help. And as a condition for securing that help, Greece has until now been forced to consent to radical austerity policies.

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