Daily Archives: June 3, 2015

The Murdoch Effect and the Continuing Bankster Crime Wave

By William K. Black
Quito: May 30, 2015

One of common characteristics of the two epicenters of the elite banking fraud epidemics – the City of London and Wall Street – is Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers’ repeated efforts to create a criminogenic environment in both financial centers by cheerleading the regulatory race to the bottom. Murdoch’s papers also act as apologists for the resultant epidemic of elite banksters’ crimes.

One of the bit players that the Wall Street Journal has deployed as part of this apologia is particularly interesting for white-collar criminologists. The setting, as always on the WSJ’s editorial pages, is that the writers are overwhelmingly the most extreme right wing ideologues. The only criminological theory that the right wing loves is “broken windows.” The WSJ presented an op ed by Heather Mac Donald of the hard-right Manhattan Institute. The title gives a good feel of the extreme claim she is making: “The New Nationwide Crime Wave: The consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’ are already appearing.”

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Sorkin on the Street’s Surge of Suicides: Ignoring the Obvious

By William K. Black
Quito: June 2, 2015

Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote two related columns only two weeks apart, but ignored his first column in writing his second. The May 15, 2015 report by the University of Notre Dame on the results of its survey of financial sector participants in the U.S. and the UK was the subject of Sorkin’s May 18, 2015 column entitled “Many on Wall Street Say It Remains Untamed.” “Untamed” is a word with a positive connotation that Sorkin chose as his euphemism in his self-appointed role as apologist-in-chief for the banksters. Here is the report’s summary.

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