Category Archives: William K. Black

Democrats Need to Give Up Being Deficit Hawks Even When it Feels Good Politically

Posted on March 24, 2016 by | 23 comments

By William K. Black
March 24, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Representative Nancy Pelosi has just written the latest effort by a prominent Democrat to bash Republicans for the high crime of not being financially illiterate.  The Republicans are frequently financially illiterate on budget issues and they bash Democrats for the high crime of not being financially illiterate.  The leaders of both parties share the hypocrisy of bashing the rival party for supporting budgetary stimulus in circumstances in which stimulus is vital.  Particular forms of budgetary stimulus can be simultaneously desirable (relative to austerity) and inferior relative to alternative forms of budgetary stimulus.  The Republican‘s favored form of budgetary stimulus – large tax cuts for the wealthy – is a remarkably inefficient means of providing  stimulus that makes income inequality worse.  Those two points are the correct bases for criticizing their proposed tax cuts.  Far too many Democrats, however, cannot pass up the political opportunity to bash the Republicans for supporting stimulus when further stimulus is vital.  When Democrats like Pelosi launch these myth-based political attacks on Republican stimulus programs they help to enshrine economically illiterate austerity policies that make it even harder for Democrats to make the case for stimulus even when it is essential.

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BWU/NEP’s Bill Black on Tax Justice Network

Posted on March 23, 2016 by | 1 comment

Bill appears on the latest podcast from the Tax Justice Network discussing banking, regulations and the Bank Whistleblowers United 60 day plan.

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The Whistleblowers’ Third Lemon Award is to Fannie and FHFA

Posted on March 7, 2016 by | Comments Off on The Whistleblowers’ Third Lemon Award is to Fannie and FHFA

By William K. Black
March 3, 2016

The Bank Whistleblowers United’s third weekly lemons award is made jointly to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and Fannie Mae (with a dishonorable mention to the federal judiciary).  The award goes for these entities’ indifference and even hostility to whistleblowers.  On September 6, 2008, the FHFA placed Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship in conjunction with the largest public bailout in global history.  Fannie and Freddie failed in an orgy of fraudulent mortgage loans.

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The Clintons Have Not Changed: The Clintonian War on the IGs

Posted on March 3, 2016 by | 6 comments

By William K. Black
February 23, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Secretary Hillary Clinton is asking Democratic voters to believe that she has experienced a “Road to Damascus” conversion from her roots as a leader of the “New Democrats” – the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.  When exactly this conversion occurred is never stated, but an interesting fact has emerged that demonstrates it did not occur during her service as the Secretary of State.  A Wall Street Journal story provides the key facts, but none of the analysis.

Newly released emails indicate that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top staff were involved in the selection process for the State Department’s internal watchdog, a position that ultimately went unfilled throughout her four-year tenure.

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The Urgent Need to Save Orthodox Economists from their Crippling Myths

Posted on March 1, 2016 by | 33 comments

William K. Black
February 29, 2016     Brooklyn, N.Y.

A blogger has trolled all heterodox economists as believers in the “occult.”  More precisely, he is upset about “econ people” (who are likely not economists) and who tweet him or post comments on his blog site.  The blogger further complains that these commenters say that they believe in heterodox economics and “new methodologies [that] are poised to topple mainstream economics.”  He then goes on to say:  “My typical response is to ask what these new methodologies are. But incredibly, I can almost never get an answer.”

The UMKC economics department is chock full of heterodox economists who share the blogger’s experience.  We too get weird blogs and tweets that are long on revolutionary conclusions and short on specifics.  Some of these messages come from folks who say they are heterodox and some from those that write to denounce heterodox economics.  We also get an endless stream of policy nostrums from orthodox economists that promise to transform America (in good ways).  They have, collectively, transformed America in terrible ways.

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Dismissing Bernie’s Supporters as “a Mob” and the Great Recession as No Big Deal

Posted on February 24, 2016 by | 10 comments

William K. Black
February 23, 2016     Bloomington, MN

In an unintentionally hilarious piece evincing exceptional moral blindness, Mr. Womack, a journalist, writes to Bernie.

Senator, you are forming a mob of angry, misinformed people and then turning it on the likely Democratic nominee. That, Senator, is a dangerous and destructive game. Does your campaign honestly wonder why it has become synonymous with nasty online invective?

Gosh, I would have thought that “nasty online invective” might call tens of millions of Americans “a mob of angry, misinformed people” who were “dangerous” because they were backing a candidate for the nomination who is not “the likely Democratic nominee.”  The idea that in an electoral nomination contest one is not allowed to criticize the current leader in delegates is, to be gentle, novel.  It is certainly not the approach that either then Senator Sanders or then Senator Clinton took when they trailed each other at various points eight years ago.

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Krugman Triples Down on His Smear of Friedman and Bernie

Posted on February 22, 2016 by | 18 comments

William K. Black
February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Paul Krugman is plumbing new depths of moral obtuseness, arrogance, and intellectual dishonesty in what is now his third smear of the well-respected economist Gerald Friedman in two days.  My prior column discussed Krugman’s two columns on February 17, 2016.  Here is Krugman’s lead in his column dated February 19.

On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three who served under Barack Obama, one who served under Bill Clinton — released a stinging open letter to Bernie Sanders and Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts professor who has been a major source of the Sanders campaign’s numbers. The economists called out the campaign for citing “extreme claims” by Mr. Friedman that “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans” and could “undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda.”

That’s harsh. But it’s harsh for a reason.

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Wall Street’s Message to Young Adults: “You are Clueless”

Posted on February 22, 2016 by | 4 comments

William K. Black
February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Wall Street CEOs are very upset with young adults.  They believe you are “clueless” and “voting against [your] own interests” when you support Bernie Sanders.  A Wall Street CEO took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to decry the fact that “Millennials are flocking to Sanders.”  It would be cruel to note that one has to be clueless to believe that writing an op ed in the WSJ was a good way to reach millennials supporting Bernie.  But at least we can gain an insight into Wall Street’s theory of why Bernie is bad for young adults.  It turns out that Wall Street is worried that Bernie is pushing Hillary Clinton to take inequality seriously because younger Americans take inequality seriously.  Wall Street, of course, loves and exists to produce staggering inequality.

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Krugman and the Gang of 4 Need to Apologize for Smearing Gerald Friedman

Posted on February 21, 2016 by | 15 comments

William K. Black
February 21, 2016     Bloomington, MN

If you depend for your news on the New York Times you have been subjected to a drumbeat of article attacking Bernie Sanders – and the conclusion of everyone “serious” that his economics are daft.  In particular, you would “know” that four prior Chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) (the Gang of 4) have signed an open letter to Bernie that delivered a death blow to his proposals.  Further, you would know that anyone who dared to disagree with these four illustrious economists was so deranged that he or she was acting like a Republican in denial of global climate change.  The open letter set its sights on a far less famous economist, Gerald Friedman, of U. Mass at Amherst.  It unleashed a personalized dismissal of his competence and integrity.  Four of the Nation’s top economists against one non-famous economists – at a school that studies heterodox economics.  That sounds like a fight that the referee should stop in the first round before Friedman is pummeled to death.  But why did Paul Krugman need to “tag in” to try to save the Gang of 4 from being routed?

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President Obama Sides with U.S. Corporate Tax Cheats

Posted on February 17, 2016 by | 4 comments

William K. Black
February 16, 2016     Bloomington, MN

I have been planning to respond to a January 26, 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Washington’s Corporate Purge” that begins with the claim that “Bernie and Hillary compete to drive more U.S. companies overseas.”  My title was going to be:  “WSJ Shills for Tax Cheats and Cheers Race to the Bottom.”  The context was a typical WSJ claim that it was “moral” to do a tax inversion deal with Ireland to cut a U.S. company’s corporate tax rate dramatically.  Murdoch’s minions’ explanation of this “moral” concept is as follows:  “A CEO obliged to act in the best interests of shareholders cannot ignore this competitive reality.”  The idea that CEOs “act in the best interests of shareholders” as opposed to the best interests of the CEO is contrary to economic logic and reality, but let’s focus on the claim that as soon as any competitor engages in the race to the bottom on taxes all U.S. CEOs have a “moral” duty to race to the bottom by avoiding paying U.S. taxes.  If that is true, then it is essential to either impose a new form of taxation that corporations cannot evade through such inversion scams ( a point that Donald Trump, of all  people, made in the most recent debate) or for governments to cooperate to prohibit such a race to the bottom.

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