Tag Archives: accounting control fraud

The Wall Street Journal Still Refuses to Grasp Accounting Control Fraud via Appraisal Fraud

Posted on December 2, 2014 by William Black | 7 comments

By William K. Black
Kansas City, MO: December 2, 2014

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) report described one of three epidemics of accounting control fraud that drove the financial crisis in these terms.

“Some real estate appraisers had also been expressing concerns for years. From 2000 to 2007, a coalition of appraisal organizations circulated and ultimately delivered to Washington officials a public petition; signed by 11,000 appraisers and including the name and address of each, it charged that lenders were pressuring appraisers to place artificially high prices on properties. According to the petition, lenders were ‘blacklisting honest appraisers’ and instead assigning business only to appraisers who would hit the desired price targets” [FCIC 2011: 18].

The FCIC Report then documents scale of this epidemic of loan origination fraud.

“One 2003 survey found that 55% of the appraisers had felt pressed to inflate the value of homes; by 2006, this had climbed to 90%. The pressure came most frequently from the mortgage brokers, but appraisers reported it from real estate agents, lenders, and in many cases borrowers themselves. Most often, refusal to raise the appraisal meant losing the client” [FCIC 2011: 91].

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, appraisal fraud, banksters, Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee, WSJ

Cochrane Demands that the Public Unilaterally Disarm while the Banksters Loot

Posted on November 20, 2014 by William Black | 2 comments

By William K. Black
San Francisco, CA: November 19, 2014

(I’m participating in the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology. I presented Wednesday on a panel honoring the 75^th anniversary of Edwin Sutherland’s announcement of the concept of white-collar crime.)

John Cochrane has written an article with an initial sentence that should spark broad agreement: “confiscating wealth is ultimately about political power.” The banksters who led the frauds that caused the financial crisis “confiscate[ed]” immense wealth from the public and “their” firms’ customers, creditors, and shareholders. They did so with nearly complete impunity, which is “ultimately about political power,” indeed it defines the extraordinary nature of their power. The banksters’ confiscation of wealth has caused a dramatic increase in inequality, which has exacerbated the banksters’ domination of the levers of power. In a prior article, Cochrane stated that the financial crisis was driven by runs on financial institutions and that the runs were typically driven by elite accounting fraud.

“Not for nothing have most runs been sparked by an accounting scandal or fraud.”

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, Cochrane, gresham's dynamic

Standard Chartered Is Outraged That It Is Treated Like A Criminal For Its Criminal Acts

Posted on November 17, 2014 by William Black | 1 comment

By William K. Black

After a decade of committing tens of thousands of felonies that the U.S. government believes helped fund terrorism and Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, having the great fortune of settling the cases without any senior officers being prosecuted or its license to operate in the U.S. being pulled, having immediately violated the settlement agreement by lying about its prior actions, being discovered to have mislead the U.S. during the settlement negotiations, and being found to have continued to violate the same U.S. laws after entering into the settlement, one might think that Standard Chartered’s leaders would learn to keep their mouths shut and to obey the law at least until the settlement agreement restrictions lapse. Standard Charter’s senior leadership, however, is composed of the most arrogant and entitled class. When the bank’s Chairman of the Board is “Sir John Peace” entitlement (but no longer noblesse oblige) comes naturally. So, instead of mea culpa, the Standard Chartered mantra is: how dare you criticize us?

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, criminal, criminogenic, fraud

NET 2 Black

Posted on November 13, 2014 by Devin Smith | 3 comments

INETeconomics’ Marshall Auerback interviews NEP’s Bill Black. Topic of discussion is the “f” word – fraud.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged accounting control fraud, Control Fraud

CEO Compensation: “Cheaters Prosper”

Posted on November 11, 2014 by William Black | 2 comments

By William K. Black

As financial regulators we have been warning since 1984 that accounting control fraud is optimized by modern executive compensation. Modern executive compensation is so perverse that it creates overwhelming incentives to engage in fraud and the means of committing the fraud that makes it far more difficult to prosecute. The CEO is able to convert the firm’s assets to his own benefit through seemingly normal corporate mechanisms. CEOs also use executive and professional compensation to generate “Gresham’s” dynamics and incentivize fraud by employees, officers, and professionals.

George Akerlof and Paul Romer added their voice to this point in1993 in their article “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” Among the points they emphasized were that accounting control fraud was a “sure thing” and that the way for the CEO controlling a lender to optimize to optimize his looting was to cause the lender to make very bad loans at a premium nominal yield. White-collar criminologists and the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement (NCFIRRE) reached similar conclusions beginning in 1993.

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Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, executive compensation, sorkin

Zero Prosecutions Aren’t Few Enough – Wall Street Wants SEC Sanctions Reduced to DMV Points

Posted on November 10, 2014 by William Black | 2 comments

By William K. Black
Kilkenny, Ireland: November 8, 2014

Wall Street’s full depravity was put on display in Joseph Fichera’s November 6, 2014 op ed in the New York Times. I hasten to add that the reason that the op ed is so revealing is that Fichera is one of the sometimes good guys who, for example, accurately warned that “auction-rate securities” were a dangerous scam and criticized JPMorgan’s odious abuse of Denver. When the Ficheras of the world join in Wall Street’s “race to the bottom” Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s President Dudley’s point about the corrupt culture that characterizes Wall Street is proven irrefutably.

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Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, Control Fraud

Thomas Curry: The Very Model of the Modern Failed Regulator

Posted on October 27, 2014 by William Black | 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

How the Rocket Scientists Aided the Senior Fraudulent Bank Officers

Posted on October 23, 2014 by William Black | 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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Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, DOJ

Liar’s Loans Ain’t “Rocket Science”

Posted on October 22, 2014 by William Black | 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

Hold Your Wallet When the Swedish Central Bank Prize Rewards “Clever”

Posted on October 13, 2014 by William Black | 2 comments

By William K. Black

The Swedish Central Bank’s (the “Bank”) prize in economics has gone to Jean Tirole. It is always good to test such an award by looking at the writings of the recipient in an area in which the reader has particular expertise. In my case, that would include the Savings and Loan debacle, financial regulation, and control fraud. Tirole’s book: The Theory of Corporate Finance was published on January 1, 2006 during the heart of the three raging epidemics of accounting control fraud that were hyper-inflating the world’s largest financial bubble and about to create the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

As I have long emphasized and will be explaining at greater length in a book about the failures of economics and economists as exemplified by far too many of the recipients of the Bank’s Prize, economics is the only discipline in which the understanding of the field’s subject of study has gone backwards. In particular, the praxis recommended by economists has proven highly criminogenic and is the primary explanation for why we suffer recurrent, intensifying crises, the rise of crony capitalism that cripples democracy and ethics, and spiraling inequality and low growth in the regions that suffer the greatest predation by our parasitical financial centers. Tirole wrote at the ideal time to judge his understanding of corporate finance as it was actively causing these catastrophes.

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