Category Archives: William K. Black

The Banksters Master Irony: Push Summers & Geithner for Fed due to their Regulatory Zeal

By William K. Black

The big banks are desperate to prevent Janet Yellen from being appointed as Bernanke’s successor to run the Fed.  Their sexist attacks have backfired.  On August 1, 2013, Deutsche Bank launched the single most absurd assertion to block Yellen’s appointment.  Deutsche Bank wants Larry Summers, or better yet Timothy Geithner, to (not) regulate them because not being regulated effectively is its highest priority.

“To the extent that the job has become much more international and with more regulation and supervision within the new financial world order, that makes people such as Summers and former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner compelling candidates,” says Deutsche Bank economist Joseph Lavorgna.

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Obama’s FBI Channels the Tea Party: Partner with the Banks and Blame the Poor for the Crisis

By William K. Black
(Cross posted and Benzinga.com)

Introduction

This is the third column in my series discussing why the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have failed to investigate and prosecute successfully the largest and most destructive financial fraud epidemic in history.  The series uses the FBI’s 2010 Mortgage Fraud report to tease out how the FBI and DOJ suffered such a defeat.

The MBA conned the FBI into a “partnership” with the trade association of the “perps.”  In my prior column I showed the first product of the partnership – a poster warning customers not to defraud banks but ignoring banks defrauding customers.  This column discusses the more consequential and damaging product of the FBI/MBA partnership.  The MBA presented a definition of “mortgage fraud” under which the bank is always the innocent victim and never a perpetrator.  Because the FBI and DOJ did not draw on the banking regulators’ expertise due to the death of criminal referrals by the agencies the FBI fell for the MBA con.

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The Incredible Con the Banksters Pulled on the FBI

By William K. Black

This is the second in my series of articles based on the FBI’s most (2010) “Mortgage Fraud Report.”

In my first column I began the explanation of how many analytical conclusions one can draw from a close reading of what is left out of the FBI report.

In particular, I emphasized the death of criminal referrals by the SEC and the banking regulatory agencies.  The FBI report implicitly confirms the investigative reporting of David Heath that first quantified the death of criminal referrals by the banking regulatory agencies.

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Fannie Mae Hires an Officer it Alleges Defrauded it – and Finance Cheers

By William K. Black

Three Bloomberg reporters have done the Nation a service by ferreting out a scandal of moderate magnitude but emblematic importance.  Dakin Campbell, Jody Shenn and Phil Mattingly broke the story on August 14, 2013 that Adam Glassner, recently described, but not named, in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) fraud suit against Bank of America (B of A), and named as a defendant by Fannie Mae’s in its fraud suit against B of A and several officers, was hired by two companies (Ally and Fannie) bailed out by Treasury.

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The FBI’s 2010 Mortgage Fraud Report Reveals Why the Banksters Love Holder

By William K. Black

The Obama administration’s continuation of the Bush administration’s refusal to prosecute the elite banksters (or even the vastly lower status CEOs of the fraudulent mortgage bank) that drove the crisis has made it clear that the rule of law no longer applies to wide ranges of life and that crony capitalism will continue to reign.

One of the difficulties we have is that because the last two administrations have fanatical devotees of the cult of the Virgin Crisis – the myth that the ongoing crisis was the first in modern times conceived without sin (control fraud) – that it is exceptionally difficult to know what their creed is.  DOJ has refused to prosecute any elite banker for mortgage loan origination fraud.  The rare prosecutions it has brought against senior officials of fraudulent loan originator (a large, but obscure regional mortgage bank: Taylor Bean) did not prosecute the officials for their fraudulent origination (or sale) of loans.  The Taylor Bean officials were only prosecuted for their fraud against the TARP program – and only because Neil Barofsky (SIGTARP) made the criminal referral about that fraud and pushed relentlessly to force the Department of Justice to prosecute.  With zero prosecutions of the massively fraudulent home lenders that drove the crisis to we are left with no information on why committing hundreds of thousands of frauds via the twin epidemics of loan origination fraud (inflating appraisals and making endemically fraudulent “liar’s” loans) is no longer a crime that the FBI investigates and DOJ prosecutes.  No senior DOJ or FBI official, of course, is stupid enough to state openly why we no longer prosecute even the CEOs of long-bankrupt mortgage banks that led these accounting control frauds.  The U.S. Attorney for Sacramento, one of the epicenters of accounting control fraud, was foolish enough to attempt to explain why he did not investigate or prosecute the banksters:

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Rajan Calls Krugman “Paranoid” for Criticizing Reinhart and Rogoff’s Research

By William K. Black

This article discusses a simmering feud among five of the most prominent economists in the world (two of them Nobel Laureates).  It was prompted by the August 8, 2013 article by Raghuram Rajan, who has just been selected to run India’s Central Bank, entitled: “The Paranoid Style in Economics.”  (Note: I have deliberately “buried the lead” in my last section.)

The personalities involved have a great deal to do with the feud, but as Paul Krugman wrote on May 23, 2013, “It’s Not About You.”

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Why are Appraisers Furious at Fraud by their Peers while Corporate Lawyers are Complacent?

By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

 

I have done a series of articles about the efforts of honest appraisers (which began in 2000) and loan brokers to alert the lenders, the markets, and the government to the twin fraud epidemics (appraisals and “liar’s” loans) committed by lenders’ controlling officers that drove the financial crisis.

Honest appraisers could have profited greatly by becoming dishonest appraisers who would be given the lucrative assignments by fraudulent lenders’ controlling officers and their agents.  Instead, honest appraisers suffered serious losses of income because they refused to succumb to the extortion efforts of the fraudulent lenders and their agents.  A national survey of appraisers in early 2004 found that 75% of them reported that they were the subject of attempted coercion designed to inflate the appraisal during the past 12 months.  A follow-up study in 2007 found that percentage rose to 90% and that 67% of appraisers reported losing a client and 45% did not get paid their fee because they refused to inflate the appraisal during the past 12 months.  Many honest appraisers were driven out of the profession by the blacklists the fraudulent lenders’ controlling officers and their loan brokers used to deny business to honest appraisers.

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Teaching White-Collar Crime

By William K. Black

Despite an enviable predictive track record and the success of our policies when they are (rarely) put into practice, white-collar criminologists re overwhelmingly ignored in our core area of expertise by decision-makers whose policies are so criminogenic that they cause the epidemics of “accounting control fraud” that drive our recurrent, intensifying financial crises.

Control fraud” occurs when the persons controlling a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a “weapon” of fraud.  In finance, accounting fraud is the “weapon of choice.”

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Is B of A the Most Embarrassing Department of Justice Suit Ever?

By William K. Black

The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) latest civil suit against Bank of America (B of A) is an embarrassment of tragic proportions on multiple dimensions.  In this version I explore “only” seven of its epic fails.

The two most obvious fails (except to the most of the media, which failed to mention either) are that the DOJ has once again refused to prosecute either the elite bankers or bank that committed what the DOJ describes as massive frauds and that the DOJ has refused to bring even a civil suit against the senior officers of the banks despite filing a complaint that alleges facts showing that those officers committed multiple felonies that made them wealthy by causing massive harm to others.  Those two fails should have been the lead in every article about the civil suit.

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Is it Legal Malpractice to Fail to Get Holder to Promise not to Torture your Client?

By William K. Black

One of the things I never expected to read was a promise by any United States official that a potential defendant in a criminal prosecution by our federal courts “will not be tortured.”

The idea that the Attorney General of the United States of America would send such a letter to the representative of a foreign government, particularly Russia under the leadership of a former KGB official, was so preposterous that I thought the first news report I read about Attorney General Holder’s letter concerning Edward Snowden was satire.  The joke, however, was on me.  The Obama and Bush administrations have so disgraced the reputation of the United States’ criminal justice system that we are forced to promise KGB alums that we will not torture our own citizens if Russia extradites them for prosecution.

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