Category Archives: William K. Black

How Bernie’s Economic Policies Fit into Economic Theory

Posted on April 20, 2016 by | 2 comments

By William K. Black
April 19, 2016     Bloomington, MN

The journalist Adam Davidson has written an interesting article about economics and Bernie Sanders.  As an economic adviser to Bernie I found his take on Keynesian and institutional economics of considerable interest.  Institutional economics, contrary to Davidson’s take on it, is thriving and the University of Missouri at Kansas City has long been a center of institutional economics.  (I am one of the scholars at UMKC that works largely in this field.)  Davidson treats institutional economics, which overwhelmingly studies microeconomics and the “micro foundations” of the economy as having been rendered obsolete by the transformation that Keynes’ insights sparked in the study of macroeconomics.

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The Old South Renews Its Assault on the LGBT Community

Posted on April 19, 2016 by | 2 comments

By William K. Black
April 17, 2016     Bloomington, MN

In the first installment of this column I showed how radically the states of the former Confederacy are acting to destroy the policies of the “New South” and disinter the Old South.  I used North Carolina as my example.  This second column focuses on the renewed assault of the Old South on the LGBT community.  In particular, I discuss why so much of the business community reacts so strongly in opposition to this assault.  But what I am most interested in is explaining why the political leaders of the Old South’s renewed assault are flabbergasted by the business community’s opposition and respond to it in ways that reinforce the opposition.  The emerging leaders of the Old South simply cannot understand why national and global business leaders see the assault on the LGBT community as a problem.  I think the anti-LGBT political leadership of the reemerged Old South have three problems that explains this lack of understanding.

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The “New South” Reverts to the Old South

Posted on April 19, 2016 by | 2 comments

By William K. Black
April 12, 2016     Bloomington, MN

The rise of the “New South” is generally dated to around 1970, when socially and economically conservative white Democratic politicians who were moderate on racial issues began to be elected as governors in many Southern states.  The timing was just right in that, due to hatred for the Republican Party’s role in stopping the spread of slavery and then winning the Civil War, that Party was still anathema to many Southern whites.  The Republican Party’s “Southern strategy” would soon reverse this process and lead to that party’s modern domination of the South.  Today, the New South is rapidly reverting back to the pathologies of the Old South.  This first column looks at North Carolina as an example of this reversion.  The second column discusses the most recent manifestation of disinterring the bigotry that defined the Old South – the atavistic assault on the LGBT community.

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Too Big to Fail From the Eyes of a Specialist

Posted on April 19, 2016 by | 1 comment

By William K. Black
April 17, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Andrew Ross Sorkin has written a column lamenting that “For a Generalist, ‘Too Big to Fail’ May Be Too Tricky to Judge” about the district court opinion finding in favor of MetLife on the question of whether it would pose a system risk were it to fail.  Sorkin runs the NYT’s “Deal Book,” which is supposed to represent the paper’s specialized expertise with regard to Wall Street.  His column demonstrates that one of the areas of expertise required to understand Wall Street is legal, and that it is beyond his understanding despite having “read hundreds of pages of legal briefs from both sides, and talked to company and government officials and outside experts….”

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Bill Clinton’s Blood Libel of the American People

Posted on April 18, 2016 by | 9 comments

By William K. Black
April 17, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Hillary Clinton uses a rhetorical device that is too clever by half.  Whenever Bernie Sanders points out that she continues to take millions of dollars for her campaign and over $650,000 personally from the infamous “Vampire Squid” whose frauds caused the financial crisis she responds that this means that Bernie is attacking President Obama too, for in 2008 his campaign’s largest donor was those same Wall Street felons.  She then says that the Dodd-Frank Act proves that campaign contributions do not affect elected officials.  Her devotion to Wall Street funding and her statement that campaign funds have no effect help explain why she does so poorly in the polls on credibility.  As I explained in a prior column, academic research confirms what we all know from life – campaign contributions play a substantial role in the decisions of elected officials.  Indeed, even Paul Krugman’s lecture notes show that he agrees with this point.  (Disclosure: I am an adviser to Bernie on economics, regulation, and criminology.)

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The Austerity Beatings of Greece Will Continue Until Its Morale Improves

Posted on April 18, 2016 by | 2 comments

By William K. Black
April 17, 2016     Bloomington, MN

The old joke, that conveys a critical truth, is the poster that says “The daily floggings will continue until morale improves around here.”  The troika misses the irony in the poster, for it thinks that the answer to the eurozone nightmare problems caused by austerity is more austerity.  The latest example is three IMF stories that ran contemporaneously.  The IMF, again, lowered global growth forecasts.  Two, the IMF is calling for fiscal stimulus rather than austerity.  Three, the eurozone wants to inflict more severe austerity on Greece, purportedly to make the IMF happy.  If you sense a logical disconnect, you are right. Continue reading →

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BWU/NEP’s Bill Black on WAMC

Posted on April 17, 2016 by | Comments Off on BWU/NEP’s Bill Black on WAMC

Bill appears on In Conversation with WAMC’s Alan Chartock. You can listen here.

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Clinton Vs. Sanders on Big Banks

Posted on April 17, 2016 by | Comments Off on Clinton Vs. Sanders on Big Banks

[Revised 4/18/16. Added Part 2 and link to Part 2]

Bill Black, adviser to Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton supporter Paul Hodes appear on The Real News and discuss whether the Dodd-Frank legislation is effective at preventing systemic risk from Wall Street monopolies. You can view the videos below or on The Real News‘ site with a transcript. Part 2 on Real News.


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“Liberal” Economists Cheered the New Democrats’ Deregulation of Finance

Posted on April 13, 2016 by | 7 comments

By William K. Black
April 11, 2016     Bloomington, MN

This is the second part of my series on how Hillary and Bill Clinton and Paul Krugman have pivoted in response to Bernie Sanders’ series of electoral wins and are racing hard right on finance and crime.  In my first column I wore my criminology “hat” to explain how Bill was disinterring outrageous (false and racist) positions that Hillary and he had once championed.  This was all the more bizarre because Hillary and Bill had recently repudiated those positions.  In the mid-1990s, Hillary and Bill sought to spread a “moral panic” about subhuman black “super predators” in order to secure passage of the crime bill that led to mass incarceration and then to maintain the 100-to-one disparity in sentencing for crack v. powder cocaine once it was known that the scientifically baseless sentencing disparity was leading to a dramatic rise in the incarceration of blacks and Latinos.  I also deplored Bill’s false claim that Black Lives Matter protesters were “defending” those who murdered black children.

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Banking Expert Who Exposed Savings & Loan Corruption Joins Sanders Campaign

Posted on April 10, 2016 by | 5 comments

By Reno Berkeley
Crossposted from Inquisitor.com

An expert in banking corruption and finance has joined the Bernie Sanders campaign. William K. Black, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-KC, is Bernie Sanders’ new economic advisor. Black was one of the central figures in exposing and prosecuting corruption in the savings and loan crisis from the late 1980s and mid-1990s. His addition to the Sanders campaign brings important knowledge in laws pertaining to finance and banking.

The savings and loan banking crisis resulted from a multitude of causes, one of which were two laws that helped deregulate them. The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. That law allowed credit unions and savings and loans to offer checking deposits, and to charge any loan interest rate they chose.
Read the rest here.

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