Category Archives: William K. Black

Prosecutors for the Petrocrats Try to Imprison the Media

Posted on October 19, 2016 by William Black | 4 comments

By William K. Black
October 18, 2016 Kansas City, MO

What happens in the petrocracy formerly known as the State of North Dakota to the tiny minority of reporters who actually expose the misconduct of the petrocrats? Fracking has perverted many organs of the government in North Dakota into petro-cronies. They act to protect their petrocrat patrons from criticism from this minority of reporters. A county North Dakota prosecutor decided to use what is becoming the petrocrats’ favorite strategy to censor Amy Goodman by imprisoning her.

In North Dakota, the petrocrats hired a force of goons with attack dogs to intimidate and attack Native American protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Amy Goodman, an award-winning journalist most famous for Democracy Now, was the only journalist to cover the attack on the protesters. The petrocrats were enraged when her video of the private goons and their dogs’ attacks on the protesters attained wide publicity.

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Will the Crisis of Confidence at Deutsche Bank Spread?

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Devin Smith | 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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Tagged banksters

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

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Devin Smith | 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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Tagged banksters

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

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Devin Smith | 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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Tagged banksters, too big to fail

Does a Golden Parachute Await Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf?

Posted on September 21, 2016 by William Black | Comments Off

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network and explains why criminal prosecutions of executives time after time are not happening. The video is below and if you would like to view with a transcript, click here.

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NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Monitor

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Devin Smith | 2 comments

NEP’s Bill Black talks with Mark Bebawi – host of The Monitor on KPFT in Houston. The topic of conversation is the Wells Fargo scandal and the settlement. You can listen to the podcast here.

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Complaining of “Taco trucks on every corner” Is Capitalist Heresy

Posted on September 3, 2016 by William Black | 5 comments

By William K. Black
September 2, 2016 Bloomington, MN

Donald Trump’s opponents have been having a field day with the latest gift from a Trump surrogate. One of Trump’s few remaining Latino supporters, Marco Gutierrez, a businessman and founder of Latinos for Trump, made an unintentionally hilarious prediction about how awful America’s future would be if Trump were not elected.

“My culture is a very dominant culture and it’s imposing and it’s causing problems,” he told MSNBC.

“If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.”

The context of Gutierrez’s nightmare of a nation besieged by omnipresent taco trucks was his attempt as the founder and leader of Latinos for Trump to make the best case for supporting Trump’s “great wall” and mass deportation of immigrants. The strongest argument Gutierrez was able to conjure up in support was his fear of omnipresent “taco trucks.”

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Tagged trump

Robbing Banks

Posted on August 31, 2016 by Devin Smith | Comments Off

NEP’s Bill Black appears on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

Nowadays we have zero prosecutions of any of the people that led the three fraud epidemics that drove this crisis. And now they are highly skilled and have seen that they can get away with financial murder. And so they are already back in the business, already selling other toxic stuff and they’re going to produce the next crisis…

You can listen to the podcast here.

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Tagged banksters, criminogenic environment

Trump is Goldman’s Golden Goose

Posted on August 23, 2016 by William Black | 11 comments

By William K. Black
August 23, 2016 Kansas City, MO

The reporting of Susanne Craig of the New York Times and David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting when he was with that paper, and has recently published The Making of Donald Trump, combine to allow us to draw a critical insight about Trump and Goldman Sachs. From Susanne Craig, we learn:

[A]n office building on Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan, of which Mr. Trump is part owner, carries a $950 million loan. Among the lenders: the Bank of China, one of the largest banks in a country that Mr. Trump has railed against as an economic foe of the United States, and Goldman Sachs, a financial institution he has said controls Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, after it paid her $675,000 in speaking fees.

Goldman Sachs is infamous for two things, both of them relevant here. Its senior managers encourage the most incestuous of relationships between the government and the firm. The revolving door is an exclusive penthouse elevator that rockets Goldman executives back and forth from positions of immense power in government and the firm. As the then President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (now, Deputy Chair of the FDIC) told a small group of us several years ago: “For the last 20 years we’ve been holding an auction to fill the position of U.S. Treasury Secretary – and of late Goldman Sachs has been winning.”

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Tagged Trump. Goldman Sachs

Covering Up Whistleblowers’ Disclosures Should Be Illegal

Posted on August 22, 2016 by William Black | 4 comments

By William K. Black
August 22, 2016 Kansas City, MO

James Stewart has written a column about Roger Ailes’ alleged sexual predation on female Fox News personnel over the course of many years. He entitled it “Secrecy of Settlements at Fox News Hid Bad Behavior.” Ailes was the CEO of Fox News. I write to show how two concepts Stewart did not employ would aid the analysis and to suggest a fundamental change in the law that would make the world a far better place.

The two concepts I add to Stewart’s analysis are “control fraud” and whistleblowing. Stewart’s column applies as its sole lens sexual harassment. That is the obvious lens to employ and it is helpful. By supplementing this lens, however, we can provide additional useful insights and frame generalized policies of broader applicability.

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