Tag Archives: banksters

Bill Black appears on Background Briefing

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Devin Smith | Comments Off

NEP’s Bill Black appears on Ian Masters’ Background Briefing discussing HSBC and the tax dodging it facilitated for its customers. You can listen here.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, HSBC, income tax avoidance

The City of London is so Criminogenic That It Boggles Even Its Banking Apologists

Posted on February 12, 2015 by William Black | 2 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: February 11, 2015

HSBC’s most recent scandal is the perfect holiday gift. Whatever genre of entertainment one favors – from blood diamonds to drug cartels to rollicking royals to sport stars HSBC was happy to aid the wealthiest stars of your genre to illegally evade their taxes. Taxes were once termed the price we paid for civilization, but they now represent the price the wealthy brag to each other about refusing to pay as they pillage civilization. Because the City of London “won” the “regulatory race to the bottom” it is the worst “vector” for the epidemic of sleaze led by our most elite bankers. Oh, sorry, I let reality intrude in that last sentence.

The “respectable” government people in the UK and the U.S. (and Ireland) insist that we are experiencing the first virgin crisis – consisting of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent transactions by bankers – in which not a single CEO of the largest banks knew that his bank was a massive criminal enterprise. The long-running (anti) morality play with an extended run in each of these three nations claims that we are experiencing the first “Virgin Crisis” conceived without sin in these bank C-Suites. In every case, the bank CEOs – paid like Croesus because they are financial geniuses and managerial wizards – has been bamboozled by the tiny folks in the banks’ “org charts.” Such a betrayal of the trust that the elite bank CEOs reposed in these unworthy junior officers and employees! The pain of the elite bank CEOs is palpable – having their reputation besmirched by their ungrateful and immoral lesser. We’ll put aside who it is that crafts the perverse incentives that created the City of London’s (and Wall Street’s) corrupt financial cultures for the same reason that the CEOs’ apologists put aside that unsettling question.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, City of London, criminogenic, HSBC

Bank Lobbyists Still Fear Progressives and the Public

Posted on February 11, 2015 by William Black | 2 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: February 11, 2015

Don’t get cocky, but also don’t give up. Bank lobbyists are still whining about opposition from progressives to the lobbyists’ agenda to (again) gut financial regulation. The lobbyists don’t fear the Obama administration, they fear progressives and the public.

The story comes from one of the reliable voices of the plutocracy – Bloomberg – in a February 11, 2015 article entitled “Banks May Have Overplayed Their Hand Fighting Wall Street Regulation.”

The financial industry is finding that winning in Washington comes at a cost.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, financial regulation

Bill Black and Alexis Goldstein on HuffPost Live

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Devin Smith | 1 comment

NEP’s Bill Black appears along with Alexis Goldstein on HuffPost Live with Alyona Minkovski. They are discussing HSBC and it’s latest mess – helping rich customers hide billions of dollars and avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes. You can watch the interview here.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged banksters, HSBC, income tax avoidance

Geithner: “The End of Capitalism as We Know It”

Posted on February 10, 2015 by William Black | 7 comments

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: February 10, 2015

Timothy Geithner’s penchant for speaking about things he does not care enough about to get right has led to him uttering many of the most cringe-worthy phrases about the economic crisis. The latest example is in David Axelrod’s new book about the Obama administration’s response to the financial crisis. This column was prompted by Sam Stein’s piece in the Huffington Post about Axelrod’s key points.

“Axelrod was ‘livid’ when he found out that Geithner and [Larry] Summers ‘had quietly lobbied’ against an amendment to the stimulus that would have restricted the payment of bonuses at firms that received bailout funds. Those bonuses had become a huge political sore point for the administration, but the finance guys argued that retroactive steps to claw back the money would have violated existing contracts.

‘This would be the end of capitalism as we know it’ Geithner told Axelrod, to which Axelrod says he responded: ‘I hate to break the news, Mr. Secretary, but capitalism isn’t trading very high right now.’”

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, Timothy Geithner

Hensarling Loves Clinton’s Worst Deregulatory Blunders

Posted on February 10, 2015 by William Black | Comments Off

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: February 9, 2015

This the second in a series of columns about Jeb Hensarling and Peter Wallison – the Nation’s chief myth makers about the causes of our financial crisis. Hensarling is the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and a leader in the effort to gut the Dodd-Frank Act’s few effective provisions. Wallison is one of the primary architects of the three “de’s” (deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization) that made the banking environment so criminogenic that it caused the fraud epidemics that hyper-inflated the bubble and drove the financial crisis.

In this second column I focus on Hensarling’s embrace of Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s worst anti-regulatory blunders. Their overall blunder was “Reinventing Government,” a broad assault on regulation and government effectiveness. In the financial sphere, Clinton and Gore embraced a fatal concept (the regulatory “race to the bottom”), two specific legislative acts of deregulation, and the growth of systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) that were “too big to fail.” Each of these blunders contributed to the most recent crisis and unless corrected will contribute to future crises. Hensarling celebrates each of these anti-regulatory blunders as superb policies.

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, criminogenic

Hensarling: Regulations (and Condoms) Don’t Work if You Don’t Use Them

Posted on February 10, 2015 by William Black | Comments Off

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: February 8, 2015

I am writing a series of columns about the Republican fantasy team of apologists for the elite banksters. Jeb Hensarling (R, TX), chair of the House banking committee that is taking the lead in trying to further deregulate banking and Peter Wallison, one of the chief architects of the most recent banking crisis, are teaming up to flog Wallison’s book. The book attempts to convince its readers that Wallison’s leadership of the effort to push the three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization – played no role in creating the criminogenic environment that produced the three most destructive epidemics of financial fraud in history. Hensarling is hosting Wallison’s book unveiling.

They are the perfect fantasy team because they inhabit a fantasy world of their own construction that rests on a foundation of non-facts with appalling logical leaps. This first column begins with a brief introduction to how crazy Hensarling is – and recall that he is the Republican Party’s leader on financial issues. George Akerlof and Paul Romer, in their classic 1993 article “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit,” explained that the 1982 federal deregulation law was “bound to produce looting.”

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged accounting control fraud, banksters, criminogenic environment

Oral Testimony of William K. Black

Posted on February 8, 2015 by William Black | 7 comments

Note: This oral testimony was delivered on February 5, 2015 in Dublin, Ireland before the Oireachtas’ Joint Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis. These are my prepared remarks. My actual oral testimony differed considerably. A transcript is available from the Inquiry, as is complete video.

To:       Joint Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
From:   William K. Black
Date:     February 3, 2015

Oral Testimony of William K. Black

Introduction

Thank you for the invitation to assist Ireland as you face among the most important questions Ireland and many other nations must answer correctly if we are to put a stop to our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. I am William K. Black and I come to you wearing four disciplinary and three institutional “hats.” My primary appointment is in economics with a joint appointment in law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. I am a white-collar criminologist and a former senior financial regulator. My research specialties include elite white-collar crime and corruption, regulation, and financial crises. I am the Distinguished Scholar in Residence for Financial Regulation at the University of Minnesota’s Law School. I am a professor at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales es la Universidad de Posgrado del Estado in Quito, Ecuador. My testimony, of course, is solely my personal views rather than the official position of any of these universities.

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Tagged bank fraud, banksters, Financial crisis, gresham's dynamic

Senator Warren and America Win in a Skirmish in a Long Struggle

Posted on January 13, 2015 by William Black | Comments Off

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: January 13, 2015

There is an excellent indicator that Senator Warren’s successful effort to block the appointment of Antonio Weiss, an Obama Wall Street bundler, to a senior Treasury position while merely a skirmish was an important accomplishment. The financial media that pander most slavishly to the Wall Street and the City of London’s CEOs is enraged at Warren’s success. The headline in the UK’s Business Insider reveals their angst “Elizabeth Warren Wins, The Treasury Loses.” The article doesn’t try very hard to support that headline with facts because there is no real case to support the claim.

“A number of former Treasury officials thought Warren was way out of line, and that Weiss’ experience was perfect for the position he was being nominated for.

The White House stood by its nominee throughout, stating last month, “This is somebody who has very good knowledge of the way that the financial markets work, and that is critically important.”

No argument on that here.”

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Posted in William K. Black

Tagged Antonio Weiss, banksters, MMT, Senator Warren

Vanity of Vanities; All is Vanity: Obama’s Vain Search for a TPP “Legacy”

Posted on January 9, 2015 by William Black | Comments Off

By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: January 8, 2015

The banksters have given Obama an important political opportunity – which he has spurned. The very first thing the new Republican majorities sought to do with their power was to use the Omnibus bill to extort the first of many cuts designed to destroy the Volcker rule. Naturally, Obama agreed and wouldn’t join the Democratic wing of the Party when they could have easily stopped the giveaway if they had received even mild help from the administration. Instead, the administration lobbied hard for the Omnibus bills’ Christmas gift to banksters.

Next, the Republicans sought to slip another big delay in the effective date of provisions of the Volcker bill through Congress. Progressive Democrats killed that attempt. The Obama administration couldn’t even bring itself to feign rage at the effort to gut the Volcker rule.

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