Author Archives: Devin Smith

Bank of England: Taking the Banks’ Fraud Proceeds Slows Growth

Posted on October 21, 2016 | 2 comments

By William K. Black
October 20, 2016 Kansas City, MO

Elite bankers and the pathetic economists who serve as apologists for their frauds specialize in proving our family saying that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody. The subtitle of the WSJ article providing the latest proof is “Fines on banks translate into $5 trillion of ‘reduced lending capacity,’ bank says.” The “bank” referred to is the Bank of England, which is supposed to be the UK’s primary bank regulator. To be kind, the “study” by BOE is so embarrassing that a better descriptor of the BOE would be “fraud enabler.”

“The roughly $275 billion in legal costs for global banks since 2008 translates into more than $5 trillion of reduced lending capacity to the real economy,” Minouche Shafik, a deputy governor of the Bank of England, told a New York conference of regulators and bankers Thursday.

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Posted in William K. Black

JD Alt Interviewed on “The Millennials’ Money”

Posted on October 18, 2016 | 2 comments

Monday, 17 October, on the weekly progressive radio program Hopping Mad with Will McLeod and Arliss Bunny, JD Alt was interviewed about his book The Millennials’ Money. The broadcast version of the interview, which aired on Netroots Radio at 8AM Eastern on Monday, 17 October, was twenty-two minutes long. The podcast version of the interview is about twice that. The podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play and on the Hopping Mad website.

JD’s book was previewed here, on NEP, in sections as he was going through the writing process and many NEP contributors participated in comment threads which influenced aspects of the book. If you have not read it in its entirety, The Millennials’ Money is quite worthwhile in that it not only brings JD’s excellent diagrams, from his best-selling ebook Diagrams & Dollars, to a hardcopy format covering the basics of MMT but then goes beyond that with some genuinely interesting thinking on how the millennial (fourth turning) generation can best use MMT to solve some of the immense challenges they face.

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Posted in J. D. Alt

Two Loaves

Posted on October 7, 2016 | 21 comments

By J.D. ALT

Recently, I’ve been trying to zero in on a peculiar set of ingredients that seem to be baked into our economic pie―and which are depriving that pie of a sustenance we, as a collective society, need it to provide. The peculiar ingredients have to do with our monetary system. Specifically, the fact that we―whether intentionally or by happenstance―have put in place and operate a money system that seamlessly creates dollars, as necessary, for profit-making enterprise, but specifically does NOT create dollars for not-for-profit ventures.

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Posted in J. D. Alt

Tagged MMT, Modern Monetary Theory

A Pocket Handbook of Soft Climate Denial

Posted on October 6, 2016 | 5 comments

Michael Hoexter, Ph.D.

In a recent piece, I introduced the concept of “soft climate denial”. In soft climate denial, people acknowledge that climate change is real and threatening and may even be panicked about it. However, in this cultural-political constellation with attendant states of mind, the solutions for climate change that are embraced are in no way commensurate to the acknowledged threats to human existence posed by anthropogenic global warming. Consequently, soft climate denial leads often to hand-wringing or other ineffectual actions but no decisive steps taken towards meeting the challenge of human-caused and human-accelerated global warming.

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Posted in Michael Hoexter

Tagged climate change, soft climate denial

Fiscal Feminism: Pavlina R. Tcherneva

Posted on October 6, 2016 | Comments Off

NEP’s Pavlina Tcherneva appears on the Laura Flanders Show. Pavlina says the current practice of gender-blind and race-blind fiscal policy lacks visions and helps no one. Congress, according to Pavlina is focusing on the wrong things. A self ascribed feminist economist, Pavlina says feminist fiscal policy is real, not simply ideological, and should be a central part of the American economy. We’ll encourage growth, she says, by creating employment — not the opposite. And employment begins with targeting women and racial minorities as the benefactors of policy.

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Posted in Pavlina R. Tcherneva

Will the Crisis of Confidence at Deutsche Bank Spread?

Posted on October 4, 2016 | 2 comments

NEP’s Bill Black recently appeared on Knowledge@Wharton’s radio show discussing the issues related to the settlement the DOJ is pursuing from Deutsche Bank. It has also appeared on the website. You can view it here.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters

‘Two Million Felonies’: Will The Wells Fargo Scandal Finally Change Wall Street?

Posted on October 4, 2016 | 1 comment

Nothing clarifies the mind of a bank board member than the loss of lucrative business deals. Wells Fargo’s CEO says he will pay a penalty for presiding over his bank’s fraud wave. Could stricter sanctions follow, perhaps even a criminal investigation?

We spoke with William K. Black Jr., economist and white-collar criminologist, about the implications of the Wells Fargo case and the laws that might have been broken.

Rest of the post is at Huffington Post. Read it here.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters

Deutsche Bank is Too Big to Fail, Too Big For Big Fines?

Posted on October 4, 2016 | 1 comment

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network. Topic of discussion is Deutsche Bank, the German bank that was at the center of the LIBOR scandal and is likely to face upwards of $5 billion in a settlement with the Justice Department. Video is below. If you would like to see with a transcript, it is here.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, too big to fail

‘Control Fraud’ – Corrupt Bankers Do It, Congress Ignores It

Posted on September 28, 2016 | 3 comments

The bipartisan shellacking Senators gave John Stumpf, the Wells Fargo CEO, last week made for great television, but did nothing about the real scandal: Our government continues to look the other way as many top bankers thumb their noses at fraud laws.

There is a term for the criminality that infects our biggest banks and damages the economy, and there is a solution to this problem. But there is also an obstacle.

Read more of David Cray Johnston’s post: ‘Control Fraud’ – Corrupt Bankers Do It, Congress Ignores It | Investopedia

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Posted in Guest Blogger

Tagged Control Fraud

CROWDSOURCING the COLLECTIVE “WE”

Posted on September 27, 2016 | 13 comments

By J.D. ALT

Let’s jump ahead to the day (surely it will come, right?) when we realize a general consensus has actually been established that, yes, it IS possible to sustainably pay for collective goods and services by the direct issuing of sovereign fiat dollars―that our federal government doesn’t have to collect taxes in order to have dollars to spend, that it doesn’t have to issue Treasury bonds to get the dollars it needs but imagines it doesn’t have.

Now that we’re here in this future moment, it’s clear we have an even BIGGER problem than we had before!

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