Author Archives: William Black

Vanity of Vanities; All is Vanity: Obama’s Vain Search for a TPP “Legacy”

Posted on January 9, 2015 | Comments Off on Vanity of Vanities; All is Vanity: Obama’s Vain Search for a TPP “Legacy”

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: January 8, 2015

The banksters have given Obama an important political opportunity – which he has spurned. The very first thing the new Republican majorities sought to do with their power was to use the Omnibus bill to extort the first of many cuts designed to destroy the Volcker rule. Naturally, Obama agreed and wouldn’t join the Democratic wing of the Party when they could have easily stopped the giveaway if they had received even mild help from the administration. Instead, the administration lobbied hard for the Omnibus bills’ Christmas gift to banksters.

Next, the Republicans sought to slip another big delay in the effective date of provisions of the Volcker bill through Congress. Progressive Democrats killed that attempt. The Obama administration couldn’t even bring itself to feign rage at the effort to gut the Volcker rule.

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Je Suis Oncle Bernard

Posted on January 8, 2015 | 3 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: January 8, 2015

As the new editor-in-chief of New Economic Perspectives (given the fantastic news, except for UMKC, that Stephanie Kelton has been named Chief Economist for the Senate Budget Committee) it is my sad responsibility to note the murder of Bernard Maris, a prominent French economist and opponent of financial terrorism via austerity, in the terror attack on Charlie Hebdo. Bernard was known in France as Oncle Bernard. This excerpt provides a brief description of the man we have all lost. We offer our condolences to all who knew him.

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EU Deflation Arrives and the Troika Continues to Fiddle While the EU Burns

Posted on January 8, 2015 | 1 comment

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: January 7, 2015

The troika (the EU Commission, the ECB, and the IMF) are flirting with throwing the entire eurozone back into a third Great Recession and much of the periphery into the continuation of the Troika Depression. For nations like Greece, the current Great Depression is now more severe and longer lasting than the Great Depression of the 1930s. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal’s journalistic malpractice in covering the troika’s gratuitous infliction of misery upon the people of Europe has been the perfect side dish to complement the troika’s toxic economic malpractice.

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Herr Henkel is Shocked that His Party Embraces Bigots

Posted on January 7, 2015 | Comments Off on Herr Henkel is Shocked that His Party Embraces Bigots

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: January 6, 2015

If one wishes to know why Germany’s financial elite embraces vicious economic assaults on their fellow Europeans of the periphery via the economic malpractice of austerity it is essential to consider not only that malpractice, but also the moral rot at the core of the German financial elite. This column updates my earlier discussion of Germany’s internal financial troika, which makes Prime Minister Angela Merkel appear almost rational. My prior column skewered the New York Times’ coverage of that troika. This update addresses the Wall Street Journal’s woeful coverage of two members of the German troika.

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The Wall Street Journal and the Troika Fear they Have Not Adequately Terrorized Greece

Posted on January 6, 2015 | 4 comments

By William K. Black
Washington DC: January 6, 2015

I’ve written recently about the embarrassing nature of the New York Times’ coverage of Greece (and the eurozone more generally), so it is time to describe the even more appalling coverage by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ has published a series of articles that contain facts that demonstrate how self-destructive the troika’s infliction of austerity has been to the eurozone, but those articles do not express that conclusion.

Worse, the WSJ publishes a steady dose of articles by Simon Nixon that are presented (at least on the web where I read them) as if they were news articles. Nixon’s job title with the paper is “Chief European Commentator,” but that title is not stated in the series of recent articles about Greece and the eurozone. He appears to have a B.A. in History and once worked as an investment banker. I assume that the WSJ’s defense of his columns is that he is a “commentator” rather than a reporter of the news though on the web I see no indication that readers are warned that they are not reading a news article.

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The WSJ Is Outraged That Someone Would “Loot a Company”

Posted on January 4, 2015 | 6 comments

By William K. Black
Washington, DC: January 4, 2015

George Akerlof and Paul Romer’s famous 1993 article “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit” introduced what criminologists call “accounting control fraud” to the economics literature. The people who control the firm (typically the CEOs) use its seeming legitimacy as a “weapon” to loot shareholders, creditors, and, if the resultant losses are large enough, the U.S. Treasury. Their article discussed several examples of such fraud epidemics, including the savings and loan debacle. Criminologists, the S&L regulators, and over 1,000 successful felony prosecutions of the S&L looters confirmed Akerlof & Romer’s insights.

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Greece, the Troika, and the New York Times

Posted on December 31, 2014 | 8 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: December 29, 2014

As I have explained in prior articles, there is an excellent chance that the Troika’s infliction of austerity on the eurozone’s periphery could, as with the austerity inflicted under the Washington Consensus continue to produce such long-term rolling recessions that it creates a political dynamic that discredits such economic malpractice and brings to power leaders elected on the promise that they will adopt economically literate policies. The first case of this in the eurozone could be Greece. (Hollande won office on a platform of opposing inflicting austerity on France, but purged his government of those that most strongly opposed austerity and implemented policies that moved increasingly toward austerity. The French economy stagnated and Hollande’s approval ratings are dismal.)

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Holder and Obama Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity v the Banksters

Posted on December 19, 2014 | 7 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: December 18, 2014

Holiday greetings! Today’s semi-sermon considers verses from tracts many consider sacred.

John 3:20 (KJV) For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.

Talmud: Here I will simply summarize the Miracle of the Lights. When the temple was restored to Jewish control its sanctified olive oil for the lamps had been profaned. Only one portion, enough to last one night was still pure. That portion, however, miraculously continued to light the temple for over a week until new sanctified oil could arrive.

The common theme, of course, is the blessings that light brings in making it much easier for good to prevail over evil. In the financial world we use a related concept – transparency. In finance, we implicitly assume that transparency also involves providing light. (Anyone who has walked into a glass door on a very dark night knows that transparency without light is no great protection.) John 3:20 is also about accountability – the desire of the evil to use darkness to avoid having their evil “deeds” “reproved.” A related verse, from our semi-sacred secular texts, was doubtless influenced by these religious themes – Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous phrase was that “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

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Obama Imports and Immunizes Banksters Who Donate to the Democratic Party

Posted on December 17, 2014 | 4 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: December 17, 2014

President Obama and then Secretary of State Clinton decided that America has a critical shortage of banksters and decided to import some from Ecuador. The banksters showed their gratitude by showing the Democratic Party with “donations.” Sometimes a small story reveals the core truth of large public policy issues far better than the big overall story can. The New York Times has just published an article entitled “Ecuador Family Wins Favors After Donations to Democrats.” The short-version is that Obama has decided to give what amounts to asylum to a family from Ecuador after it made large campaign donations to Democrats.

“It was one of several favorable decisions the Obama administration made in recent years involving the Isaías family, which the government of Ecuador accuses of buying protection from Washington and living comfortably in Miami off the profits of a looted bank in Ecuador.

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UK Determined to Win the Race to the Bottom and Remain the Global Financial Cesspool

Posted on December 17, 2014 | 3 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: December 16, 2014

On June 20, 2012 the UK Commercial Secretary to the Treasury, Lord Sassoon of Ashley Park gave a speech to the British Bankers Association – the group the U.S. government (i.e., the FDIC) found to have helped organize the world’s largest price rigging cartel and fraud in the form of rigging Libor. The financial crisis occurred under the “new” neo-liberal Labour when its championing of the three “de’s” – financial deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization – combined with modern executive and professional compensation and the effective elimination of “joint and several liability” to make the City of London the most criminogenic environment in the world for financial “control frauds.” Naturally, the Tories have decided that the answer to this disaster is to double-down on Labour’s embrace of the three “de’s.” Indeed, the first words in Lord Sassoon’s prepared speech were “Thank you Philip [Hampton].”

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