Tag Archives: white-collar criminology

Obsessing About The “Thin Blue Lines” While Elite White-Collar Crime Runs Rampant

By William K. Black
July 4, 2016     Bloomington, MN

The New York Times published a book review entitled “Thin Blue Lines.”  The two books reviewed were about street crimes.  Based solely on reading the NYT book review, and wearing my criminology hat, neither book adds materially to the useful literature.  The two books, and the book review, however, share a common characteristic that is worth analysis.  All three conflate “street crime” with “crime” and “police” with “law enforcement.”  The “blue lines,” of course, refer to police, rather than the FBI white-collar crime section that is supposed to investigate elite white-collar crime.  If the American police represent “thin blue lines,” then in comparison the pittance of law enforcement personnel charged with investigating elite white-collar crime represent the sheerest tissue paper – so insubstantial that they must be described as diaphanous or gossamer.

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The Criminology of the “Sure Thing” Portrayed as “Risk”

By William K. Black

John Coates, a former derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs is now a researcher. He wrote a column in the New York Times entitled “The Biology of Risk” that I hope will be widely read.

In this column I explain why his most important conclusions cannot follow logically from his own description of his research finding. While he relies on blood tests, his account of trading when it goes horribly wrong is curiously bloodless and disingenuous. As a Goldman and Deutsche Bank refugee he knows better, but he presents a sanitized version of the crisis portraying the controlling officers and traders at the largest banks as helpless victims of raging hormones rather than fraud perpetrators and facilitators.

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An Offer of Assistance to Senator Claire McCaskill in her Investigation of GM

By William K. Black

“‘I won’t be letting G.M. leadership, or federal regulators, escape accountability for these tragedies,’ Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat who is chairwoman of a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, said in a statement.”

Senator McCaskill’s statement makes the correct points.  GM’s leadership and the federal regulators have, to date, “escape[d] accountability.”  I want to extend an offer of assistance to Senator McCaskill.  The key to understanding GM’s otherwise incomprehensible actions is to understand the perverse effects of the compensation system that GM’s leadership designed.  This is one of our areas of expertise.

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Edwin Sutherland: The 75th Anniversary of His Coining The Term White-Collar Crime

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

Introduction

This year is the 75th anniversary of Edwin Sutherland’s presidential address to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in 1939.  In the course of beginning to write a book from a white-collar criminological perspective about our modern financial crises I decided to reread Sutherland’s address (which was published as an article in 1940) to see how it stands up in light of modern white-collar criminological research and theory.  It reads exceptionally well today.  It is not even archaic in tone.  Sutherland begins by listing eleven (there were two van Sweringen brothers involved in their scam) examples of the kind of criminals he was referring to.

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