HSBC CEO: My Pay Was so Outrageous I Had to Use Tax Havens to Hide it from My Peers

Posted on February 23, 2015 by | Comments Off on HSBC CEO: My Pay Was so Outrageous I Had to Use Tax Havens to Hide it from My Peers

By William K. Black
Quito, Ecuador: January 23, 2015

Greetings from Quito, where I will be spending four months teaching at IAEN about effective regulation and building ties with UMKC.

The latest twists on the latest HSBC tax evasion and tax avoidance scandal is that it has come out that Stuart Gulliver, HSBC’s head, put his money where his mouth wasn’t. He personally used double tax havens – Panama plus Switzerland – to hide his income and wealth from view because his pay was so outrageous that even other HSBC executives would have been outraged by it. The New York Times’ account of this tale demonstrates that Gulliver needs to fire Gulliver as his spokesperson.

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Go Canadians!

Posted on February 21, 2015 by | 9 comments

Canadian whistleblower’s testimony leads to multi-billion dollar settlement

Article by Krysia Collyer and cross posted from globalnews.ca

For more than five years –big U.S. banks have been under scrutiny for their part in the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. – America’s largest bank- is no different. For its part in the crash – the bank made an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to payout $13 billion to atone for misleading investors.

“I was completely caught off guard by the settlement,” says a former JPMorgan employee.

That’s Canadian-born, Alayne Fleischmann. She worked for JPMorgan as a transaction manager. Her job was to review and find the red flags in home loans the bank wanted to purchase from a mortgage lender.

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The Worst Article Title by an Economist about the Crisis

Posted on February 20, 2015 by | 4 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: February 19, 2015

This column discusses the most embarrassing title of an economic study of the U.S. financial crisis. It rivals the most embarrassing title of an economic study of the Icelandic crisis.

“The 2010 Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job tells how [Frederic] Mishkin changed the name of the study from ‘Financial Stability in Iceland’ to ‘Financial Instability in Iceland’ on his curriculum vitae.”

Geetesh Bhardwaj of AIG Financial Products and Rajdeep Sengupta, a St. Louis Fed economist, entitled their September/October 2008 article: “Where’s the Smoking Gun? A Study of Underwriting Standards for US Subprime Mortgages.”

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What’s Wrong with David Leonhardt’s NYT Piece on Inequality?

Posted on February 19, 2015 by | 5 comments

By Pavlina Tcherneva

The New York Times made waves this week with another piece on inequality, saying that it has not risen since 2007. The article was based on this paper by GWU’s Stephen Rose.

The article also suggests that expansions are not a good way of looking at trends in inequality (as I have done in the past, also covered by the NYT). Instead, one needs to look at the business cycle. It also concludes that, thankfully, because of government tax and transfer policies, inequality has not been “that bad” over the last few years and governments can clearly do something about it.

So what’s wrong with this picture?

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Greece wants to save Europe, but can it persuade Europeans?

Posted on February 18, 2015 by | 4 comments

By Pavlina Tcherneva
Cross posted from aljazeera.com

Most analysis of the Greek debt crisis ignores an important reality: While Greece may be the villain du jour, every eurozone nation is profoundly short of cash. That’s because of a well-acknowledged, but not fully appreciated, flaw at the heart of eurozone financial architecture that converted a historically unprecedented number of nations from issuers of their own currency to users of a common currency.

Greece is simply the first country to experience the extreme consequences of that loss of monetary sovereignty. With no independent source of funding, no currency of its own, no central bank to guarantee its government liabilities, it has had to ask others for help. And as a condition for securing that help, Greece has until now been forced to consent to radical austerity policies.

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The HSBC Scandal: A Red Flag for U.S. Regulators?

Posted on February 18, 2015 by | 1 comment

NEP’s Bill Black appears on Knowledge@Wharton discussing the HSBC scandal with Jennifer Blouin. You can see the story and hear the podcast here.

 

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Get a TAN, Yanis: A Timely Alternative Financing Instrument for Greece

Posted on February 16, 2015 by | 44 comments

By Rob Parenteau

The recent election of an explicitly anti-austerity party in Greece has upset the prevailing policy consensus in the eurozone, and raised a number of issues that have remained ignored or suppressed in policy circles. Expansionary fiscal consolidations have proven largely elusive. The difficulty of achieving GDP growth while reaching primary fiscal surplus targets is very evident in Greece. Avoiding rapidly escalating government debt to GDP ratios has consequently proven very challenging. Even if the arithmetic of avoiding a debt trap can be made to work, the rise of opposition parties in the eurozone suggests there are indeed political limits to fiscal consolidation. The Ponzi like nature of requesting new loans in order to service prior debt obligations, especially while nominal incomes are falling, is a third issue that Syriza has raised, and it is one that informed their opening position of rejecting any extension of the current bailout program.

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The Study that Foreshadowed the Three Fraud Epidemics that Drove the Crisis

Posted on February 15, 2015 by | 3 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: February 15, 2015

I will be writing a series of articles concerning the three mortgage fraud epidemics that hyper-inflated the bubble and drove the financial crisis prompted by four recent economic studies of mortgage fraud. My goal is to integrate the results of those studies with the work of criminologists, investigators, and data from other sources such as Clayton.

In economics and white-collar criminology, we teach our students the very useful concept of “revealed preferences.” We take what potential perpetrators say they would do and why they claim they took an action with cartons of salt. Their actions generally speak far louder and more candidly than do their words. I will show in this series how valuable revealed preferences are in analyzing the data and testing rival research hypotheses. (I will explain why I feel the recurrent failure to state these hypotheses expressly leads to serious error.)

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The BBC Dismisses a Real Greek Economist as a Sexy “Ideologue”

Posted on February 14, 2015 by | 6 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: Valentine’s Day 2015

In its web version, the BBC “News” has you click on a tease titled “Yanis Varoufakis, charismatic ideologue” to access a story dated February 13, 2015 entitled “Profile: Yanis Varoufakis, Greek bailout foe.” Neither the tease nor the title make any sense. Varoufakis is the Greek finance minister. Except, of course, we’re reading this in the BBC, so the description actually reads “Greece’s left-wing Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.” Funny, the BBC never describes the head of the ECB as “the ultra-right-wing” economist Mario Draghi or Jeroen Dijsselloem, the Dutch Finance Minister and troika hit man as the “ultra-ultra-right-wing” non-economist.

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Bank Leaders Condemn Themselves

Posted on February 14, 2015 by | 3 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: Valentine’s Day 2015

If you inhabit the reality-based universe you know that finance has become a parasite that is a leading threat to our economies and democracies. A series of financial regulators – each of them infamous for their slavish apologias for bankers and banking – now admit that our most elite banks and bankers have created corrupt cultures that have turned the world’s largest banks into the world’s largest criminal enterprises.

How have top bank leaders reacted to this corruption? There is a new report out that asked bank leaders that question.

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