Tag Archives: fraud

Bitcoin Frauds Keep Growing

By William K. Black
June 18, 2018     Kansas City, MO

One of the prime myths that white-collar criminologists have to refute repeatedly is that blockchain makes fraud impossible.  Blockchain, in some settings, is a costly means of making some frauds much more difficult.  Blockchain is useless against the most important frauds.  The primitive worship of blockchain as a supposed garlic capable of warding off evil breeds complacency, and complacency produces increased fraud and greatly extends the life of fraud.

The difference between making fraud impossible and (in a few specialized settings) ‘much more difficult’ brings to mind the critical difference explained in The Princess Bride between ‘dead’ and ‘mostly dead.’  Blockchain is useless in stopping, for example, any or the three epidemics of ‘control fraud’ that drove the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession.  Lenders’ executives extorted appraisers to inflate appraised values of homes, creating a Gresham’s dynamic in which bad ethics tends to drive good ethics out of the markets and professions.  The second fraud epidemic in loan origination was ‘liar’s’ loans, which were designed to aid lenders and their agents to inflate the incomes of borrowers.  Note that both of these primary fraudulent loan origination schemes involve lenders deliberately seeking to provide false (inflated) data designed to inflate the market value of homes.  The third fraud epidemic that drove the U.S. financial crisis was the fraudulent sale of these mortgages to the secondary market through false “reps and warranties” about loan underwriting – principally the fraudulently inflated appraisal values and borrowers’ incomes.

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The Inaugural Financial Fraud Lemons of the Week Award Goes to DOJ

William K. Black
February 12, 2016     Bloomington, MN

The Bank Whistleblowers United announce the inaugural Financial Fraud Lemons of the Week award.  There can be no more fitting recipient than the ironically named Department of Justice (DOJ).  The “lemon” is used in the economics and criminology literature to refer to a car of surpassingly terrible quality.  The quality is so bad that the car can only be sold through fraud.  We will award it each week to an example of dishonesty or cowardice about financial fraud that is worthy of public ridicule.  We want to leave room in our scale for truly spectacular examples, so this first award will only receive Four Lemons.  The first award is for what has become a routine example of dishonesty and cowardice by DOJ.  Its conduct should be a scandal of national proportions, but by now everyone expects DOJ to embarrass our Nation when it deals with elite bankers.

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Hillary, the Banksters Committed “Fraud” not “Shenanigans”

William K. Black
February 4, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her debate with Senator Sanders minutes ago, said that she went to Wall Street and told them to stop their “shenanigans.”  The context was that she was being asked to respond to the complaint that she was too close to on Wall Street billionaires.  She had every incentive, therefore, to demonstrate how tough she would be on Wall Street.  In that context, the best she could muster was the pusillanimous “shenanigans.”  Here is a typical definition of that word with examples.

  1. : a devious trick used especially for an underhand purpose
  2. 2a:  tricky or questionable practices or conduct —usually used in pluralb :  high-spirited or mischievous activity —usually used in plural

Examples of shenanigan

  1. students engaging in youthful shenaniganson the last day of school
  2. an act of vandalism that went way beyond the usual shenanigansat summer camp

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Meet Citi’s Ethical Underwriters That Tried to Save It and America: Sherry Hunt

By William K. Black
Quito: March 26, 2015

This is the fourth and final column in my series that began by focusing on Richard M. Bowen, III.  Bowen blew the whistle on Citi’s sale of scores of billions of dollars in toxic mortgages, primarily to Fannie and Freddie, through fraudulent reps and warranties.  After Bowen protested and blew the whistle within Citi to its senior management (including Robert Rubin) – Citi’s senior officers’ classic accounting control fraud strategy expanded both in terms of the volume of sales and the incidence of fraudulent reps and warranties – which rose to 80 percent.

I have explained how Bowen and his boss’ banking careers were destroyed by the retaliation of Citi’s senior managers and how the SEC, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) have followed the disgraceful policy of trying to keep Bowen’s detailed disclosures from becoming public and being used to bring Citi’s criminal controlling officers to justice.

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McCloskey’s First “Cheer for Corruption” is also a Cheer for Fraud

By William K. Black
Quito: March 5, 2015

In my first column in this series I discussed the gaping contradiction in Deirdre McCloskey’s book review of two books on corruption. The title of her article captures the immorality of her proposed “sermons” on corruption: “Two Cheers for Corruption.” McCloskey urges us to embrace many forms of corruption because she asserts that they add to economic efficiency and justice.

“But corruption can be efficient and just, too. It can be good for efficiency if, say, bribes are paid to get around bad laws (such as most of the building codes in American cities) or to smooth the course of sales by U.S. businesses to the Egyptian military. And the turkey at Christmas supplied by Tammany Hall justly helped the poor—if they voted right.”

McCloskey’s first of three “cheers for corruption” is inherently a cheer not only for corruption, i.e., bribery and extortion, but also a cheer for four types of felonies by elite white-collar criminals. The first crime is deliberately violating the building safety codes. The second crime is covering up that underlying crime through corruption – the bribery and/or extortion of the building safety code inspectors.

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McCloskey’s Plea for an Unethical Ethical Response to Corporate Bribery

By William K. Black
Quito: March 4, 2015

Deirdre McCloskey has provided another proof of our family saying that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody. She did so in the guise of a review in the Wall Street Journal of two books on corruption. McCloskey’s thesis is that only ethics, not institutions, matter when it comes to stopping corruption.

“All that works in the end is ethical change, urged from the mother’s knee, the pastor’s pulpit, the judge’s bench, the schoolmaster’s lectern. It is fruitless to propose ‘mechanisms’ or ‘institutions’ absent an ethical desire in enough of us to do good.

We need sermons, which is to say instruction from our mothers and movies and imams about How to Be Good. Sarah Chayes and Jay Cost provide ample texts for the sermons. Indignation on the ground, if pervasive, stops corruption. The books give us cause for indignation, surely. But the rest is up to us, or our mothers teaching us at their knees.”

McCloskey proposes that we create “pervasive” “indignation” demanding an end to “corruption.” She suggests that the key is the consistency of that ethical message to “do good.” We need “sermons” from clergy, mothers, teachers, judges (during sentencing), and the media and movies that reinforce the message that the public must achieve a “pervasive” loathing of corruption and a commitment to “stop” it.

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

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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Capital “Can’t be Gamed” – Except Whenever the Bank CEO Wants To

By William K. Black

On October 6, 2014, the Wall Street Journal, only three days ago, published an editorial claiming that regulatory capture was “inevitab[le]” and that we should give up on regulation and rely instead on “simple laws that can’t be gamed” such as an increased capital requirement for banks.  I wrote a two piece response to the editorial.  What I just discovered (though it bears an October 7, 2014 date on the WSJ website) is that one day after the editorial claimed that asset and liability values (the inputs that define “capital”) “can’t be gamed” they presented data indicating that corporations frequently game asset values and that private auditors frequently fail to follow former audit procedures to detect and prevent the overstatement of asset values.  The title of the article is “Audit Deficiencies Surge” and the first two sentences contain the key data.

“Auditors at the largest U.S. accounting firms failed to follow proper procedures in more than four in 10 audits, according to the latest inspections by the U.S. government’s audit watchdog. That was more than double the rate four years earlier.”

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Floyd Norris’ Apologia for Citi’s Frauds

By William K. Black

I have just written a column about the New York Times’ financial journalist, Floyd Norris’ August 20, 2014 column decrying attacks on those who detect and seek to sanction elite frauds.  Norris’ focus was on the Chinese government attacks on whistleblowers who “detect” elite frauds.  Norris bemoaned that those who detect elite fraud suffer far more than those that commit it.

My column pointed out that the practice of elite frauds, in league with their protectors in government and the media, attack those that detect and seek to sanction elite frauds in every country.  Indeed, I showed that Norris had aided and abetted the SEC’s leadership’s smears of Gary Aguirre, the SEC whistleblower who detected evidence of what he (and his superiors) considered likely fraud by elites.  His SEC superiors, however, blocked the investigation when they discovered it would lead to John Mack, the soon-to-be CEO of Morgan Stanley, one of the world’s largest investment banks.

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Europe’s Lousy Bank Loans Expose the “Recovery” Myth

By William K. Black

One of the great lies of the financial industry is that it is the engine of Main Street’s growth.  Giving the finance industry an enormous share of total business profits was supposed to super charge Main Street’s growth.  It has never delivered on this promise.  The truth is the opposite.  The efficiency condition for a middleman like finance is that its size and profits should be minimized.  Finance’s fraud epidemics blew up the world economy and devastated Main Street.  Finance is a parasite that saps Main Street.  The latest example of this comes in a New York Times article about European bank’s bad loans.

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