How credit crisis revealed weakness in US approach to epidemic of fraud
This column addresses the high price paid by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors’ failure to read Akerlof & Romer
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No Crisis Here
I decided to look at what President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) were saying in their annual reports for 2005-2007 about the massive real estate bubble, epidemic of accounting control fraud and mortgage fraud, the resultant…
Destroying the Periphery in Order to Save the Core’s Banks
William Black writes that the non-payment of debt – including bank debt – by the nations on the periphery would lead to severe banking crises and a return to recession in the core of eurozone. This is what is behind the stance of the ECB,…
Reflections on Geithner’s Hatred for Prosecuting Criminal Contributors
By William K. Black cross-posted from New Economic Perspectives In the Savings and Loan (S&L) debacle Speaker Wright became enraged at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Department of Justice when he learned that the FBI was…
Einmal ist Keinmal
I can no longer say that not a single senior executive of one of the major nonprime lenders whose frauds hyper-inflated the housing bubble and caused the Great Recession has been convicted of his frauds. A single senior executive of one of…
Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum
It is one of the paradoxes of life that the most practical means to ensure that the system does not collapse is to insist on justice for all and to ignore demands for special treatment premised on claims that justice places the system at…
Why we need regulatory cops on the beat – and why they make bankers cringe
If firms that defrauded their customers gained a competitive advantage over their honest rivals private market discipline became perverse and drove honest firms into bankruptcy.
The CEOs that lead accounting control frauds create…
Countrywide Control Fraud, Inch Deep Prosecution
By William K. Black
I write to contrast four recent stories about Countrywide. Here are their headlines and brief synopses provided in the initial paragraphs of the stories.
U.S. drops criminal probe of former Countrywide chief Angelo…
Freddie Mac: Tone Deaf at the Top
By William K. Black
Freddie Mac made a terse announcement Wednesday in a securities filing about the resignation of its chief operating officer, Bruce Witherell. Freddie said that Witherell resigned "for personal reasons."…
Wallison in His Own Words on Causes of Crisis
By William K. Black (Cross-posted from Benzinga) The big news in U.S. regulation last week was the release of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reports. (There's a major article in the New York Times about Kabul Bank that supports…