Author Archives: William Black

The New York Times Claims Democratic Leaders in Latin America are “Military Dictators”

Posted on October 28, 2014 | 5 comments

The NYT wrote an extraordinarily arrogant, insulting, dishonest, and hypocritical editorial attacking a series of Latin American democracies. The editorial manages to insult their democratically elected representatives and their electorates. The title of the editorial is “South America’s New Caudillos.” The editorial does not bother to define the word. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines caudillo as “a Latin American military dictator.”

The editorial claims that it was prompted by the democratic reelection of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia. The editorial concedes that he was reelected in a well-deserved, democratic “landslide.”

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged latin america, nyt

Thomas Curry: The Very Model of the Modern Failed Regulator

Posted on October 27, 2014 | Comments Off

By William K. Black

I explained in a 2012 column as soon as Thomas Curry was publicly identified as the likely new head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) why he was such a poor choice to be a regulatory leader. Curry is such a good example of Obama’s crew of failed agency heads because he is neither evil nor stupid. As I explain below, he views morality as a misnomer in banking. He is the rarity among Obama appointees, a true professional regulator. He is well within the top 50% of Obama’s (dismal) appointees in finance and regulation.

Curry is also an abject failure who should be cashiered immediately. No one had to order him to fail or intimidate him into failure. He represents anti-regulation as usual, which has been the pattern in finance since 1993. One can read his speeches and see that he has learned none of the essential lessons from the crisis and lacks even a dying ember in his belly, much less the raging fire required for regulatory success. We know from his record of failure as an FDIC director from January 2004 throughout the crisis that had he been the top federal regulator in the savings and loan debacle rather than Ed Gray cost of the debacle would have grown to trillions of dollars. At that level it would have hyper-inflated real estate bubbles and likely caused a severe recession.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, Control Fraud

The New York Times Finally Allows Competent EU Commentators

Posted on October 25, 2014 | 3 comments

By William K. Black

As my regular readers know, the NYT coverage of the EU financial crisis has been shameful, economically illiterate, and harmful. In the last two weeks, however, that coverage has finally begun to mention the concept of inadequate demand, the fact that governmental spending can provide demand, and that austerity is not the only available choice. In the last 10 days the coverage even began to quote economists who made the point that austerity is the problem rather than the solution. This modest improvement has taken six years, two gratuitous Great Recessions, and Great Depressions for about one-third the eurozone’s population.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged Austerians, austerity, nyt

Jamie Dimon: U.S. Must Create a “Safe Harbor” Where JPM’s Corruption Is Not “Punished”

Posted on October 24, 2014 | 14 comments

By William K. Black

I want to give a hat tip to a recent Wall Street Journal article that brought to my attention two damning admissions by JPMorgan’s (JPM) CEO and Chairman of the Board, Jamie Dimon. The irony is that Dimon was lulled into making these admissions because he was basking in the perfect calm created by the confluence of Sorkin’s and CNBC’s storied sycophancy at the one place on earth where elite bankers feel most loved, honored, and protected – the annual meeting of the ultra-wealthy in Davos, Switzerland. Sorkin was the only interviewer, so Dimon faced no risk of tough questions. It may well have been this perfect setting that caused Dimon to let slip the mask and reveal two illustrative sins of elite bankers reported in the WSJ article.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged Andrew Ross Sorkin, banksters, jamie dimon, JPM Chase

How the Rocket Scientists Aided the Senior Fraudulent Bank Officers

Posted on October 23, 2014 | 2 comments

By William K. Black

In my first column in this two-part series I explained how the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) non-prosecutorial effort against the banksters’ frauds that caused the financial crisis had ended with a pathetic whimper uttered by Deputy Attorney General James Cole during his ritual exit interview with Bloomberg. Cole’s explanation for DOJ’s failure to prosecute a single senior banker for leading the three fraud epidemics that drove the financial crisis was that DOJ was “dealing with financial rocket science.” My first column made the point, which escaped DOJ and Bloomberg that if this were true it would presumably have been modestly important for DOJ to do something about the ability of “rocket scientists” to grow wealthy by leading the frauds that cost the U.S. $21 trillion in lost GDP and 10 million jobs. In my second column I explained why no rocket science was required to prosecute the senior bank officers that led the three most destructive epidemics of financial fraud. In light of a reader’s comment I promised to write this third piece on “rocket science” in the financial context.

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2 Comments

Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, DOJ

Liar’s Loans Ain’t “Rocket Science”

Posted on October 22, 2014 | 2 comments

By William K. Black

In my first column in this two-part series I explained how the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) non-prosecutorial effort against the banksters’ frauds that caused the financial crisis had ended with a pathetic whimper uttered by Deputy Attorney General James Cole during his ritual exit interview with Bloomberg. Cole’s explanation for DOJ’s failure to prosecute a single senior banker for leading the three fraud epidemics that drove the financial crisis was that DOJ was “dealing with financial rocket science.” My first column made the point, which escaped DOJ and Bloomberg that if this were true it would presumably have been modestly important for DOJ to do something about the ability of “rocket scientists” to grow wealthy by leading the frauds that cost the U.S. $21 trillion in lost GDP and 10 million jobs. I also promised this column explaining why it was not true. In light of a reader’s comment I’ll add a third piece on “rocket science” in the financial context.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, Great Financial Crisis, liar loans

Not with a Bang but a Whimper: DOJ Says it Cannot Prosecute “Rocket Science” Frauds

Posted on October 18, 2014 | 6 comments

By William K. Black

This is the way the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) greatest strategic prosecutorial failure ends, not with a bang but a whimper that it is too hard to prosecute “rocket science” frauds. The context is the ritual Bloomberg exit interview with the senior DOJ official going off to make his new fortune. The lucky fellow this week is Deputy Attorney General James Cole. This genre of interview is designed to allow the man in the revolving door to announce his great accomplishments as a prosecutor, or in this case, non-prosecutor. Cole gamely claims that zero prosecutions constitutes a brilliant success because DOJ’s civil cases “have resulted in banks paying huge fines and altering their behavior.”

“Holder today praised Cole as his ‘indispensable partner’ since taking the deputy’s job in January 2011. ‘Jim’s leadership and ingenuity have been critical in attaining historic results on behalf of the American people,’ Holder said in a statement.”

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged ag holder, banksters, DOJ

Krugman’s Bashes Progressives for Criticizing Obama on Grounds that He Criticizes Obama

Posted on October 18, 2014 | 17 comments

By William K. Black

Paul Krugman’s admirers would never list modesty as one of his characteristics. He has written a column “In Defense of Obama” that begins by explaining that his criticisms of President Obama were correct, but that unidentified others’ criticisms of Obama constitute “trash talk.”

Specifically, Obama “came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain.” Obama sought to produce a self-inflicted disaster by desperately trying to reach a “Grand Bargain” with Republicans that would have inflicted austerity on our Nation in 2012, “slash[ed] Social Security and [raised] the Medicare [eligibility] age.” As even Krugman admits, we were saved from this catastrophe “only by Republican greed, the GOP’s unwillingness to make even token concessions” to achieve the Grand Bargain. What Krugman omits in the tale is that it was also a revolt by Democratic progressives against the Grand Bargain that saved Obama and the Nation.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, Financial crisis, financial regulation, krugman

Deal Book Says Citi “Cannot Afford” to Run an Honest Bank in Mexico

Posted on October 15, 2014 | 4 comments

By William K. Black

Deal Book, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s ethics-free paean to painless elite bank frauds – all the wealth and none of the accountability – has plumbed new depths in its coverage of Citi’s latest frauds. It has literally written that Citi “cannot afford” to run an honest bank in Mexico.

I’ll put aside for another day the obvious point that Citi does not run an honest bank in the U.S. so the authors’ implicit assumption that Citi’s problems arise from a corrupt Mexican culture is false and bigoted. For purposes of analysis only, I will discuss the logical implications of the Deal Book’s “Blame it on Mexico” thesis. That thesis does not lead the NYT authors to ask Citi’s leaders to discuss which of three options it chose given that it cannot afford to run an honest bank in Mexico.

To run an honest bank in Mexico anyway, or
To lead a movement to clean up banking and politics in Mexico, or
To stop banking in Mexico

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4 Comments

Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, Citi, NYT Deal Book

EU Ideologues “Crowd Out” Sanity

Posted on October 14, 2014 | 1 comment

By William K. Black

It is often the small things that best illustrate insanity. On October 13, 2014, EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Jyrki Katainen spoke to emphasize one message:

“[The EU’s leaders] ‘don’t want the [European Investment Bank] EIB crowding out private investment.’ He said the EIB should be used to leverage money from the private sector, ‘and play a part in big infrastructure projects,’ notably ones that have been delayed.”

It’s helpful to situate this smaller example of economic insanity within the broader context of the insanity of austerity inflicted by those same EU leaders. The general insanity is that the EU politicians are the most economically illiterate and extreme member of the troika. I just wrote a column explaining that they are bitterly attacking Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank (ECB) for (in their warped interpretation) becoming apostate on the subject of austerity. The IMF, at least many of its professional economists, left the one truth faith of the austerians long ago when it began publishing research showing that fiscal stimulus was a great success and even its leadership began to warn against austerity.

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