Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

NEP’s Bill Black on The Real News

Bill appears on The Real News along with Public Banking Institute founder Ellen Brown. They are discussing Hillary’s record on regulating Wall Street. You can watch the video below and for the video with transcript, you can visit The Real News here.

The Media Fall for Hillary Clinton’s Gensler Gambit

By William K. Black
Quito: April 16, 2015

Richard Cordray (former Attorney General of Ohio), the head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPG) and Gary Gensler (a former disaster under Bill Clinton and Goldman Sachs) have been the two great appointments by President Obama in the field of finance.  Obama’s other appointments at Treasury, the financial regulatory agencies, and the (non) prosecutors who are supposed to specialize in financial prosecutions have been nightmarishly bad.

Gensler was another Rubinite from Goldman Sachs who, under Bill Clinton, helped destroy Brooksley Born’s effort to protect the nation from the financial derivatives that blew up AIG and much of the financial world through passage of the infamous Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.  As Obama’s appointee to chair the Commodity Futures Trade Commission (CFTC), however, Gensler justly earned praise for attempting to restore effective regulation.  Gensler was a grave disappointment to Obama’s administration, which thought it was sending a reliably pro-finance Rubinite to run a fairly obscure agency he had helped emasculate.  When Gensler showed a spine Obama refused to reappoint him and replaced Gensler with Timothy G. Massad, a Timothy Geithner minion noted for his pro-industry views.  Massad’s claim to fame was being one of the principal unprincipled architects of the failed homeowner relief programs.  As I pointed out in my first Bill Moyers interview, failing (for the right political reasons) proves you are a reliable “team player” and gets you promoted in Washington, D.C.  As Geithner found out, succeeding gets you your walking papers.  Jesse Eisinger, as his norm, wrote a great piece about Massad when Obama nominated him in November 2013.  An alternative view can be found in the American Banker, which gave prominently space to an op ed praising Massad’s nomination written by the head of a firm that trains CFTC staff.

Continue reading

Hillary Remains Clueless About Regulation on the 28th Anniversary of the Keating Five Meeting

By William K. Black
Quito: April 9, 2015

The Clintons’ Unlearned Lessons of the Keating Five Meeting

On April 9, 1987, twenty-eight years ago today, my colleagues and I from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco (FHLBSF) met with five senators at the behest of the most notorious savings and loan (S&L) fraud – Charles Keating.  Keating was looting Lincoln Savings through classic “accounting control fraud” techniques.  Our examiners and enforcement investigation led by Anne Sobol (detailed from Litigation Division) had discovered and documented some of Keating’s worst frauds.  Keating, desperate to prevent our recommendation that the federal agency place Lincoln Saving into conservators (removing Keating from power), used the five senators to try to pressure us into taking no enforcement action against Lincoln Savings and its officers for the largest violation of rules in the history of our agency.

Continue reading

Will We Ever Get Change if We Keep Electing People Who Represent Special Interests?

We can see the positioning and the messaging on the Democratic side beginning to take shape for the 2016 elections. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with nods to Thomas Piketty and various economists have stepped forward to offer the themes of salvation for the middle class, moderating the extremes of inequality in American society, and doing something real about jobs and wages.

Clinton World seems to be responding, not yet with forthright statements from Hillary Clinton, but recently with articles by stalwarts of neoliberal Clintonism (and veterans of the Obama Administration) such as Larry Summers and Peter Orszag, expressing concerns about inequality and proposing measures to alleviate it, even including increased taxation on the wealthy.

Continue reading