Tag Archives: banksters

Bernie Sanders Decries Lack of Wall Street Prosecutions

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News and says it’s important to reimplement the Glass-Steagall Act – but it’s not enough to prevent another financial crisis. You can view here with transcript or watch video below.

Can the Bank of England’s New ‘Ring-fencing’ Rules Work?

NEP’s Bill Black and Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics Peter Conti-Brown discuss the Bank of England’s move to re-regulate the banking industry in Britain and protect depositors and taxpayers. You can view the article and listen to the podcast here.

Now the DOJ Admits They Got it Wrong

William K. Black

September 10, 2015

By issuing its new memorandum the Justice Department is tacitly admitting that its experiment in refusing to prosecute the senior bankers that led the fraud epidemics that caused our economic crisis failed. The result was the death of accountability, of justice, and of deterrence. The result was a wave of recidivism in which elite bankers continued to defraud the public after promising to cease their crimes. The new Justice Department policy, correctly, restores the Department’s publicly stated policy in Spring 2009. Attorney General Holder and then U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch ignored that policy emphasizing the need to prosecute elite white-collar criminals and refused to prosecute the senior bankers who led the fraud epidemics.

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Geithner’s Ghost Writer and the Parable of the River of Risk

By William K. Black
Quito: June 9, 2015

Michael Grunwald has written a column attacking Senator Bernie Sanders. It is entitled “Don’t break up the megabanks.” As Grunwald appropriately discloses, he is Timothy Geithner’s ghost writer and a fervent co-religionist of Geithner’s gospel of adoration of and devoted service to the world’s most fraudulent bankers.

Grunwald gives the reader fair warning that he has no financial expertise and is prepared to say anything to try to defend the banksters and Geithner when he makes his first argument the claim that it is “un-American” to break up banks that pose a global systemic risk. To the contrary, few things could be more American if you are even remotely familiar with American views of megabanks from the founding of our Republic.

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President Obama Fateful Error in Making Bush’s Goldman Sachs/AIG Scandal His Scandal

By William K. Black
Quito: June 3, 2015

We have known from the beginning that Lanny Breuer, who the Obama administration chose as its head of the Criminal Division in order to ensure that there would be no prosecutions of the banksters that led, and were enriched by the fraud epidemics that drove the crisis, would be a national embarrassment. Readers may recall that Breuer publicly admitted that what caused him to lose sleep was not the world’s most destructive fraud epidemics that ruined our economy or his grant of effective immunity to the banksters who led and became wealthy through those frauds. He lost sleep solely over his fear that if he held them accountable for the frauds that had bankrupted their corrupt banks those banks might be placed in receivership and honest managers appointed. (Of course, that isn’t how he phrased it, but that is what he was actually saying.)

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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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SEALs, CEOs, Milton Friedman, and Fraudulent Incentives

By William K. Black
Quito: May 31, 2015

I saw an intriguing squib in the Wall Street Journal about an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “How the Navy SEALS Train for Leadership Excellence.”  The article offers an, unintentionally, useful insight into the pathologies of elite business schools, their “leadership” faculty, and our elite C-suites.

The most interesting comment in the article is by Brandon Webb, a former senior SEAL sniper trainer.

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The WSJ and Barron’s Apologists for the Banksters Peddle Wallison’s Fables

By William K. Black
Quito: May 23, 2015

Few people’s efforts at myth-making have been as devastatingly refuted as Peter Wallison. But fables that are designed to make the banksters look less criminal are always welcome by the banksters. Any honest discussion of Wallison’s claims would begin with three points. First, Wallison’s adult life has been devoted, on behalf of the banksters, to pushing the three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization. He is therefore as culpable as anyone in the world for the epidemics of accounting control fraud that drove the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

Second, he was appointed by the Republican leadership to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) to assure that the banksters would have the benefit of their leading apologist. The chances that he would ascribe any problems to the three “de’s” was always non-existent because he does not have a scholarly instinct in his body. He is rabidly ideological and a willing tool of the banksters.

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President Obama Should Apologize for Labelling Americans a Murderous Mob

By William K. Black
Quito: April 28, 2015

This column was prompted by Charles M. Blow’s excellent column about the slanderous way that the term “lynch mob” is used by the right-wing to denounce Americans whenever we protest police violence against (primarily) people of color. The protesters want justice. They do not want to lynch anyone. The same is true of the American people’s demands that the banksters be brought to justice.

President Obama, however, began his term of office by slandering the American people who wanted him to restore the rule of law and bring the banksters to justice. Simon Johnson and James Kwak, the authors of Thirteen Bankers, cite Obama’s claim to the 13 bankers at the infamous March 31, 2009 meeting so close to the start of his term of office that he was all that was protecting them from the public’s “pitchforks” as the defining event of the administration on financial issues.

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