Author Archives: Devin Smith

NEP’s Bill Black Appears On CCTV’s Biz Asia America

Posted on July 12, 2013 | Comments Off on NEP’s Bill Black Appears On CCTV’s Biz Asia America

CCTV America’s Phillip Yin speaks with Bill Black about new US bank regulations. Bill warns against ‘too big to fail institutions’ and the attempts to create a ‘tame tiger’ through policy, which he believes is a reckless path to the next financial crisis

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Heeding the Appraisers’ Fraud Warnings Would have Prevented the Crisis

Posted on July 11, 2013 | 34 comments

By William K. Black

On July 9, 2013 I participated in a radio interview with a lobbyist for the 100 largest financial firms.  The San Francisco radio program host asked me what question I would ask the lobbyist and I said that any discussion should begin with allowing him to state his view of what caused the crisis.  In the course of his explanation, he bemoaned the fact that there was no warning about the crisis.

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Politically Fashionable Carbon Gradualism vs. Reality

Posted on July 10, 2013 | 21 comments

By Michael Hoexter

The recent re-entry of the Obama Administration into public discussions and advocacy for climate change action has been a mixed blessing for the climate action movement.  On the one hand, President Obama possesses the (U.S.) bully pulpit as President and thus can broadcast messages, which can be heard around the country and the world.  Furthermore he leads the executive branch of the US federal government, where his Administration can enforce existing regulations, negotiate international business and political relationships, and set climate and energy targets for the functioning of the federal government’s internal operations.  Indications that the US President personally is concerned about climate and assigns it a medium or high priority would, one would assume, make more likely real policy and executive actions, not just speeches.  Against the background of relative US government inaction on climate change over the past two and a half decades, the decision to bring the climate issue out of the shadows in the beginning of his last term in office and his June 25th speech would under most circumstances be viewed as a net “win” for climate action and the climate movement, no matter what the exact content of his policy prescriptions.

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Discrediting Regulation: from George Stigler to Tyson’s Fraud-Free Carbon Tax Fantasy

Posted on July 8, 2013 | 3 comments

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

Laura D’Andrea Tyson (President Clinton’s principal economist) has written an ode to a “carbon tax” that does not acknowledge a single disadvantage or substantive (as opposed to political) concern with such a tax.  A carbon tax can have advantages, but her article oversells the idea and ignores the severe concerns about such a tax.  Her article demonstrates why the Clinton administration’s anti-regulatory and fiscal policies helped sow the seeds of ongoing financial disaster.  (The Bush administration watered and fertilized those seeds and we all reaped the whirlwind.)

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Justice Scalia’s Despairing Effort to Disguise DOMA’s “Badge of Inferiority” of Gays

Posted on June 27, 2013 | 14 comments

By William K. Black

Introduction

Justice Scalia yearns the days when gays could be imprisoned for consensual, adult sex.  His rage at the changes in the Nation and the Supreme Court on equality for same sex relationships and his impotence to stop those changes is palpable.  Fortunately, while he demands that his colleagues be “anodyne” in their pronouncements and cease demonizing their critics he is immune to self-awareness and irony.  As a result, we can count on him to display rudeness and condescension in heaping portions in oral argument and his opinions.  His dissent in Windsor (which declared the portion of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) dealing with federal recognition of lawful same sex marriages unconstitutional) is a derisive critique of the Court’s opinion.  In this column I discuss his efforts to disguise DOMA’s “badge of inferiority” for gays and lawful same sex marriages.  I explain the landmines he sought to avoid triggering on this point. Continue reading →

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The Game Theoretical CEO: An Inexplicable Lawful Agent

Posted on June 24, 2013 | 1 comment

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

Introduction

This is the sixth (and final) of my series of articles on the work of Roger Myerson, a 2007 Laureate in Economics.  Myerson’s work on CEOs is typical of the game theoretical approach to explaining the behavior of CEOs and firms, so I am discussing an exemplar rather than an outlier.  This installment discusses some of the fatal flaws that I argue characterize the game theoretical work on CEOs by the Laureates.  I will urge that they are weakest where they believe they are strongest – their models.  The article explains why the models are specified incorrectly because the models have no coherent theory (or understanding) of fraud or ethics.  The game theoretical Laureates (Laureates) make unsupportable implicit assumptions that are belied by the data and internally inconsistent with their explicit assumptions.

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The Heritage Foundation: Where 7.8% Growth is “Moderate” and 4.4% is “Spectacular”

Posted on June 23, 2013 | 7 comments

By William K. Black

Heritage Foundation is run by Jim DeMint, the former Tea Party legislator.  Heritage promptly demonstrated the impact of its new leadership with its purported study of the benefits and costs of immigration that ignored the benefits and inflated the costs.  Even other conservative groups were appalled – and that was before one of the co-authors of its studies’ past writings on the inferiority of certain minorities that purportedly made assimilation fail became public.  Heritage is one of many anti-think tanks where anyone with a progressive thought is shown the door.

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William Black Appears on Alpha and Omega

Posted on June 23, 2013 | 1 comment

NEP’s William Black appeared on the June 22, 2013 episode of Alpha and Omega. The topic of discussion is about a series of articles he has written over the last year on the economic achievements and political shenanigans of Rafael Correa, the President of Ecuador.

You can visit the site here.

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Confessions of a Confused but Privileged Right Wing, Liberal, Libertarian

Posted on June 20, 2013 | 11 comments

By William K. Black

I was doing an unrelated search when I stumbled across a series of articles by “Citizen K” discussing me.  K explained the purpose of K’s January 26, 2013 column as:  “debunk[ing] Black’s self-promotion and right wing political idea that in the virtuous past justice prevailed.”  When pressed on this by a commenter, K explained:

“Yes it’s right wing to push the Bush admin as an exemplar of moral values. Libertarian fairy tales about how Capitalism used to be so moral in the good old days are right wing.

[Name deleted by me to protect his privacy] is not in the same ballpark as Black. He’s a very smart guy and pretty illuminating.”

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Myerson’s Ode to Crony Capitalism

Posted on June 18, 2013 | 7 comments

By William K. Black

This is the fifth installment in my series of article about the predictive and policy failures of Roger Myerson, Nobel Laureate in economics in 2007.  My first two articles critiqued his claim that capitalism’s unique advantage over communism is plutocracy because only exceptionally wealthy CEOs can be successfully bribed by their shareholders to “imitate” “good” CEOs who will not cheat the shareholders.

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