By J.D. Alt
Somehow a great confusion has arisen. It has divided our nation into feuding, bickering camps, caused many to view their own government as a ruthless competitor, and is now seriously threatening us with, among other things, a frightening deluge of collapsing bridges. The confusion is about money—what it is, where it comes from and, most important, whether there is enough of it to pay for all the things we need as a nation.
This is the fourth installment of my exploration of the work of Roger Myerson, Nobel Laureate in economics in 2007. It is part of what will be a broader series of articles exploring why economics is unique among the sciences in awarding the Prize to scholars whose predictive work proves profoundly wrong and leads to public policies that cause great harm. The first installment used Myerson’s Prize lecture to explore his paean to plutocracy as the purported unique advantage of capitalism.
Posted in William K. Black
Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, Control Fraud, executive compensation, Myerson, plutocracy, plutocrats
Bill Black appeared on the June 11, 2013 pledge drive edition of Tell Somebody. The topics of discussion were economics and regulation. You can listen here.
Comments Off on NEP’s Bill Black Appears on Tell Somebody
Posted in William K. Black
Tagged economics, regulation, Tell Somebody
By Michael Hoexter
350.org’s “Do the Math” educational campaign and documentary film points out a crucial fact for our time: that most of the known reserves, the assets of the fossil fuel industry, must remain in the ground untapped, for the climate to remain something remotely like what we have known throughout the history of civilization. Civilization requires agriculture, which is dependent on a few sensitive species to produce a surplus of food for masses of people with comparatively lower levels of labor or mechanical work. If we make the climate inhospitable to these species, as well as to ourselves, via fossil fuel use and degradation of the carbon buffering capacity of the environment, we will make it vanishingly likely that our own success as a species will continue.
Roger Myerson has recently updated an article on his purported mechanism for explaining why our supposedly efficient markets are producing growing crises.
A MODEL OF MORAL-HAZARD CREDIT CYCLES (March 2010, revised September 2012)
Posted in William K. Black
Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, Control Fraud, plutocracy, plutocrats
By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)
In my first article on the Nobel Laureate Roger Myerson’s failed policies that helped make finance so criminogenic that it drove the ongoing financial crisis I began the exploration of Myerson’s claim that plutocrats constituted the unique advantage of capitalism over a system that forbade privately-owned firms. Myerson calls a system that forbids privately-owned firms “socialism.” He asserts that plutocrats demonstrate the accuracy of Friedrich von Hayek’s assertion of the inherent advantage of “capitalism.” My first article used Myerson’s Prize lecture to explore why his methodology, theories, and recommended policies failed so spectacularly. This article expands on that theme by citing other work by Myerson.
Posted in William K. Black
Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, Control Fraud, plutocracy, plutocrats
The Architect Who Couldn’t Sing, by NEP essayist J.D. ALT has been awarded an eLIT gold award for 2012. The book, which is also available in paperback, makes the case for directing sovereign spending toward a specific kind of infrastructure Alt calls an “Enabling Structure”. Almost exactly a year ago, he introduced the concept of “Enabling Structures” in his first NEP essay Playing Monopolis Monopoly. In that essay, they were playfully represented as a second level to the Monopoly game board, but they are, in fact, an actual architectural concept Alt has been pursuing for many years. Continue reading
Posted in J. D. Alt
By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)
Introduction
This article begins a project to critique the work by economists concerning regulation that has led to the award of Nobel prizes. The prize in economics in honor of Alfred Nobel is unique. It is not part of the formal Nobel Prize system. It was created by a large Swedish bank and it is the only “science” prize frequently given to those who proved incorrect. The theme of my series is how poorly the work has stood the test of predictive accuracy. Worse, it has led to policies in the private and public sector that are criminogenic and explain our recurrent, intensifying financial crises.
Posted in William K. Black
Tagged accounting control fraud, Control Fraud, plutocracy, Riksbank, Roger Myerson
We have further proof about how thin-skinned Treasury Secretary Geithner was, but we have it in the form of a weird May 29, 2013 story by Ben Protess in the New York Times. The story is in part about me, though it doesn’t mention me, because it is a story that notes that Treasury was able to convince NPR to remove from its December 13, 2013 broadcast a statement I made criticizing Geithner – an action that NPR took and noted, but without naming me as the source of the criticism. The weird part of the NYT story is that while it confirms the accuracy of the statement I made about Geithner it asserts that the statement by the unidentified “academic” criticizing Geithner was false. Continue reading
Posted in William K. Black
Tagged crony capitalism, HSBC, Liberty Reserve, npr, nyt, Timothy Geithner, too big to prosecute
By William K. Black
Standard Chartered and HSBC’s leaders must be doubly humiliated by the description by Mythili Raman, the acting head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Criminal Division, of Liberty Reserve’s money laundering operation. UK laws are, of course, very congenial to those suing for libel and I am sure that these banking titans are meeting with their solicitors to demand a retraction and apology from Raman. In the very first clause of her May 28, 2013 statement to the media on the actions against Liberty Reserve’s controlling officers, Raman emphasized how “professional” they were as money launderers: “Today, we strike a severe blow against a professional money laundering enterprise charged with laundering over $6 billion in criminal proceeds.” In four paragraphs, she used the word “professional” three times and “sophisticated” once to describe Liberty Reserve’s money laundering. Continue reading
Posted in William K. Black
Tagged accounting control fraud, Control Fraud, DOJ, HSBC, Liberty Reserve, Standard Chartered
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