Category Archives: Banana republic

Bill Black: We Send Teachers to Prison for Rigging the Numbers, Why Not Bankers?

One has to wonder if the prosecutorial investment in bringing down a public school test-cheating ring has less to do with concern about the students and more to do with charter schools.

Don Quijones: Rajoy Horror Picture Show Nears Grisly Climax in Spain

Don Quijones describes Rajoy’s record of misrule and how the major parties are jockeying in advance of its almost certain unraveling.

Elizabeth Warren Strikes Back as Citigroup Tries to Blackmail the Democratic Party

Citigroup tried to get back at Elizabeth Warren and her allies for daring to call out The Bank That Must Not Be Named. The move looks to have backfired.

Joe Firestone: The New York Times Soft-Pedals the Dangers of the TPP

While the New York Times did a public service by joining Wikileaks in publishing a draft chapter of the TPP, the accompanying article is quite another matter. Joe Firestone has taken it upon himself to~~shred~~ analyze it. The sad reality is that the Times is never going to oppose neoliberalism in a serious way.

Bill Black: Meet Citi’s Ethical Underwriter Who Fought and Won: Sherry Hunt

How Citi ran into a buzz saw and lost a False Claims Act case when it tried stymieing whistleblower Sherry Hunt. But true to form, the DoJ took the easy way out.

Thoughts About the Trans-Pacific Partnership

The leak of the investment chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has confirmed that it’s as bad as critics said it was.

Bill Black: How FCIC Spurned Its One Chance at Greatness

How the FCIC not merely ignored but actually suppressed information that revealed what and more important, who, drove the crisis.

Matt Taibbi Takes Up SEC’s Andrew Bowden Regulatory Capture Scandal

Matt Taibbi has written a characteristically informative, incisive piece about the embarrassing spectacle of the SEC’s Director of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, Andrew Bowden, making sycophantic remarks about the private equity industry at a recent conference, a story we broke early last week.

Bill Black: The DOJ and the SEC Spurn their Ace in the Hole – Richard Bowen

This is the second post in a devastating series on why major banks and their executives got away with large-scale, systematic fraud in the runup to the crisis. Bill Black uses Citigroup whistleblower Richard Bowen as a case example of how derelict the DOJ and SEC were in the performance of their duties.

Here, Black describes how historically frauds and criminal conduct were pursued primarily by regulators and the FBI. However, not only were regulations were weakened, but the Bush Administration ended criminal referrals: “References to the criminal referral coordinators disappeared or were removed from the bank examiners’ manuals.” FBI staffing for white collar crime was cut drastically as the war on terror was given precedence.

That meant, as Black describes, whistleblowers became more important than ever as not just a source of information for civil and criminal prosecutions, but as key witnesses. Yet in many cases they are problematic. They are often disaffected former employees who call out the bad conduct they saw after they were terminated, or were so badly roughed up by their former employer for becoming an internal dissident that they were traumatized and don’t hold up well on the stand. Hence, as Black explains, the failure to take advantage of a stellar whistleblower like Richard Bowen. As Bowen put it, “Not only did they bury my testimony, they locked it up.”

John Helmer: Auction House Bonhams, Sued Over Frauds and Forgeries, Casts Pall Over Russian Art Market

We’ve said that fraud is the fastest growing business in the US, but the US is far from having a lock on that market. One of the proofs is the way our Richard Smith has turned chasing international scammers into a full-time activity.

Scamming has strong links to money laundering. That seems to have exploded as more and more of the global rich seek to move cash across borders in ways not readily tracked by tax men and border officials. The New York Times, for instance, did a major expose on high end real estate as a money laundering vehicle, focusing on one building, the Time Warner Center in Manhattan.

John Helmer looks at another nexus, that of art and very high end collectables, through the lens of auction house Bonhams. However, there are intriguing extra wrinkles with Bonhams which puts it closer to the Graham Greene world of shadowy dealing than is the norm for the art world. And since Bonhams is a major dealer in Russian art, the collateral damage extends to the Russian art market, as well as Bonham’s efforts to sell itself.

Billl Black: The Lessons Richard Bowen’s FCIC Testimony Should Have Taught the Nation

Get a cup of coffee. This important post gives an in-depth analysis that helps explain how bad conduct was covered up or glossed over by the FCIC, and how much of the media fell in line with the official, sanitized story.

Gaius Publius: Ron Wyden, Progressives and the TPP

Are progressives willing to attack Ron Wyden on TPP?

Video of Panel Revealing SEC Regulatory Capture Put Back On Line by Stanford Law

Last week, we wrote about a damning example of regulatory capture that occurred at a conference at Stanford Law School on March 5. In the Q&A session, the SEC’s head of examinations, Andrew Bowden, threw a big bouquet at an industry he oversees, private equity, repeatedly calling it “the greatest,” praising its returns, and saying that he’s told his son that he’d really do well to get a job in private equity.