Category Archives: Banana republic

Bill Black Discusses “Too Big to Jail” on Bill Moyers

Bill Black gives one of his best recaps ever of the “too big to jail” syndrome on Bill Moyers. For readers who missed the story, Black gave critical testimony in a Federal prosecution of small fry mortgage fraudsters. He helped persuaded the jury that in fact no fraud took place because the banks were willing to underwrite any predatory, poorly underwritten loan in the runup to the crisis. Black savages the posture of the Department of Justice in this case and in general.

Bill Black: Fed Failure – A “Perfectly Legal” Scam is Perfectly Unacceptable to Real Regulators

Yves here. In this post, Bill Black does the yeoman’s work of stepping through one revelation in Fed whistleblower Carmen Segarra’s tapes from some of her discussions with more senior colleagues at the New York Fed. A critical section involves how Fed officials became aware of the fact that Goldman had slipped language into an already-closed transaction with the Spanish bank Santander that indicated that the Fed had been informed of the deal and had not objected, neither of which was the case. The staffers tried to rouse themselves to challenge Goldman on this misrepresentation, and lost their nerve.

But as bad as letting Goldman roll the Fed on the matter of non-existant non-objections is concerned, Black stresses the much more serious underlying failure: Goldman had created the impression that the Fed was kosher with Goldman helping Santander fool European bank regulators by pretending it was more solvent than it was. The effort to game banking regulations is an even bigger deal than the effort to pretend the Fed was all on board. Black blasts the clearly captured New York Fed “relationship manager” Mikel Silva in gratifying detail.

Ending the Era of Stupid

I’m giving to Yves Smith and Naked Capitalism. You should too. And you should dig deep. What we are doing, together, is nothing less than composing a symphony of what will be an intellectual revolution. What are we revolting against? The Age of Stupid.

William R. Black on Prosecuting Criminal Banker CEOs: Obama and Holder Don’t Even Care Enough to Fake It

You don’t bat zero for the season without a plan.

Ukrainian Squillionare Victor Pinchuk and His Clinton, Brookings, and Peterson Connections

What do Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton, Anders Aslund, Steven Pifer, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and the Brookings Institution have in common? Answer: they drink the mother’s milk of politics from the Ukraine. Lots of it.

Obama Administration Again Sides With Abusive Loan Servicers, This Time on Student Loans

A corrosive development is the ease with which lenders ~~steal~~ extract income which is not properly theirs from borrowers through what is at best incompetence and in far too many cases is fraud. This pattern has repeats itself again and again: in mortgage servicing, with debt collection, and more and more with student loan servicing.

Media Giving Corporate Executives a Free Pass on Their Value Extraction

Executive rentiers and their media lackeys are invoking the canard that they can’t find decent investment opportunities. The truth is that they’ve exhausted the first and second lines of value extraction, that of labor-squeezing and disinvestment, and aren’t prepared to accept the lower but still attractive returns of taking real economy risks.

Bill Black: Roger Cohen’s Ode to Colonialism and Imperialism: Why is It “Insidious” to Want Justice for Banksters?

A remarkable (in a bad way) New York Times op-ed shows that Roger Cohen is so deep in the banksters’ pockets that he cannot see that he is a leader in the movement to ensure that no bankster will ever “pay for his sins.”

Finance Sector Wages: Explaining Their High Level and Growth

Individuals who work in the finance sector enjoy a significant wage advantage. This column considers three explanations: rent sharing, skill intensity, and task-biased technological change. The UK evidence suggests that rent sharing is the key. The rising premium could then be due to changes in regulation and the increasing complexity of financial products creating more asymmetric information.

US Corporate Executives to Workers: Drop Dead

The Washington Post has a story that blandly supports the continued strip mining of the American economy. Of course, in Versailles that the nation’s capitol has become, this lobbyist-and-big-ticket-political-donor supporting point of view no doubt seems entirely logical. The guts of the article: Three years ago, Harvard Business School asked thousands of its graduates, many […]

Kim Dotcom, Glenn Greenwald, and New Zealand’s Intelligence Service, GCSB

Does New Zealand’s Intelligence Service spy indiscriminately on New Zealanders? High-profile, high-stakes claims and counterclaims, just ahead of the NZ elections.

Is New Jersey Fudging Its Pension Fund Results to Defuse a Christie Scandal?

You cannot make stuff like this up. New Jersey, in its attempt to diffuse a pension fund scandal that implicates Chris Christie (it roused him to respond in public), looks to have committed the classic crisis management blunder of a cover-up worse than the original crime.

Low Wage Growth, High Long-Term Unemployment Recognized as International Problem

High unemployment and low wage growth are solvable problems. But powerful and well placed people believe it is in their interest to keep them unsolved

The ECB as Enabler: Doubles Down on Failed Monetary Policies

The ECB took a few surprise measures on Thursday mainly as a signal that central banks are willing to Do Something, even when sort of somethings they can do are at best unproductive. But the weak tea of lowering the benchmark rate by 10 basis points to 0.05% and announced it would be implementing a watered-down version of QE, in which it will start buying asset backed securities and covered bonds nevertheless pleased investors initially. bu the enthusiasm proved to be short lived; in the US, the modest stock market lift in the morning had gone into reverse by the close of trading. The announcement did produce one tangible positive outcome for the flagging European economy, which was to lower the value of the euro.

Tony West’s Departure Ends Era of Pathetic Bank Settlements

With the imminent departure of Tony West from the Justice Department, we can assuredly close the book on this latest round of financial fraud settlements. West was a co-chair of the vaunted task force known as the RMBS Working Group: of the original members, only U.S. Attorney for Colorado John Walsh and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman remain. And West was the point person inside the Justice Department for the JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America cases (“Top Nemesis of Big Banks,” screams the New York Times for some reason).