Tag Archives: too big to prosecute

Bank Failures are “Inconceivable” under the Latest Neoclassical Fantasy

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

Only theoclassical economics constantly recycles variants of its worst ideas that have proven disastrous when they have influenced policy.  Other fields advance because they embrace the scientific method.  Theoclassical economists repeat their worst errors because they embrace anti-governmental dogmas that blind them to the inherent weaknesses of the corporate form and limited liability.  This represents a dramatic regression in understanding from over 200 years ago when classical scholars like Adam Smith were warning that corporations were inherently criminogenic and likely to produce what we now label “control frauds.”

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Assad Reveals He’s a Bank CEO: Obama Ends Threats, Bails Out Syria & Grants Immunity

By William K. Black

I do not think the twin epidemics of mortgage loan origination fraud (appraisal and “liar’s” loans) and the various epidemics of post-origination fraud by financial institutions are comparable crimes to the use of chemical weapons.  The President’s job, however, is to deter a wide range of criminal conduct.  The elite fraud epidemics cost over $11 trillion in losses to households alone and 10 million American jobs.  The cost of these fraud epidemics is so vast that deterring future epidemics should be a high priority of every administration.  The refusal of the Obama and Bush administrations to prosecute any elite banker whose actions contributed to the crisis has done the opposite of deterring future fraud epidemics – it has encouraged them.

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Think Global, Act Local: the SacBee Needs to Write about its U.S. Attorney

By William K. Black

The Sacramento Bee is a paper with a fine pedigree that just wrote a powerful editorial entitled: “Wall Street needs to be schooled in the rule of law.”

 “When the president feels the need to call out his own people for not moving fast enough on new rules for Wall Street, you know that things have really bogged down.

That’s what Barack Obama did Monday, urging top financial regulators to get going on enforcing the Dodd-Frank law, passed by Congress three years ago but still adamantly opposed by big banks.

Wall Street’s freewheeling ways and outright fraud worsened the worst financial crisis this nation has faced since the Great Depression. Nearly five years later, many large financial institutions are making big profits again, but relatively few wrongdoers have seen the inside of a prison cell.

Precious little has truly changed.

Who gets the short end of the foot-dragging? The vast majority of Americans, of course, those who aren’t favored clients of Wall Street firms. You can bet we’re the ones who will be left holding the bag if there’s another crash because proper safeguards aren’t in place.”

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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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NEP’s Bill Black Appears on Peak Prosperity Discussing Financial Markets

The Banks Have Blood on Their Hands and the regulators are too fearful to act. Bill returned to Peak Prosperity to explain whether the level of systemic risk due to fraud in our financial markets has improved or worsened since the dire situation he painted for us in early 2012. Sadly, it looks like abuse by the big players has only flourished since then.

The New York Times Butchers the Story of How Treasury Got NPR to Censor My Criticism of It

By William K. Black

We have further proof about how thin-skinned Treasury Secretary Geithner was, but we have it in the form of a weird May 29, 2013 story by Ben Protess in the New York Times.  The story is in part about me, though it doesn’t mention me, because it is a story that notes that Treasury was able to convince NPR to remove from its December 13, 2013 broadcast a statement I made criticizing Geithner – an action that NPR took and noted, but without naming me as the source of the criticism.  The weird part of the NYT story is that while it confirms the accuracy of the statement I made about Geithner it asserts that the statement by the unidentified “academic” criticizing Geithner was false.  Continue reading

Yglesias pours the Geithner, Holder, Breuer (GHB) banksters immunity doctrine in our drinks

By William K. Black

It’s early, but Salon has published on January 30, 2013 either the funniest or saddest column of the year to date: “Are Banks Too Big To Prosecute?” 

The column is attributed to Matthew Yglesias, a blogger who studied philosophy as an undergraduate.  It could be a brilliantly ironic satire of the Geithner, Holder and Breuer doctrine of immunity for banksters (which I am dubbing “GHB” for short).   GHB is the “roofie” that the Obama administration gave us so the banksters could screw us repeatedly with impunity.  Alternatively, and far more likely, Yglesias has written the saddest and most immoral apologia for elite white-collar crime that has yet made it into electronic bits.  It takes a rerouted beginning student of philosophy, posing as a commentator on finance, to replace what should be a discussion that includes virtue ethics with a virtue-free, criminology-free, and economics-free apologia for the felons who became wealthy by costing the Nation $20 trillion and 10 million jobs.

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Why did Obama and Cameron save a Criminal Enterprise like HSBC?

By William K. Black

Why is HSBC still in operation?  On the same day (December 10, 2012) that the Obama administration leaked the story of the HSBC settlement a story ran in the New York Times that was full of self-praise by the Obama and Cameron (U.K.) governments for their “cooperative approach” to cracking down on systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs).  SDIs are treated as “too big to fail” because they pose a global systemic risk when they fail.  The HSBC settlement puts the lie to the Obama/Cameron crack-down on the SDIs for it revealed a disgrace – Obama and Cameron treat the SDIs as too big to prosecute.  Indeed, HSBC demonstrates that the SDIs’ senior officers are treated by Obama and Cameron as too elite to prosecute.   The propaganda meme of the NYT story – that the SDIs would never again be given special favors due to reforms being adopted by Obama and Cameron – lasted four hours before it was destroyed by the disgraceful reality of the Obama and Cameron governments’ refusal to prosecute HSBC and its officers for their tens of thousands of felonies.

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