Category Archives: Banking industry

Bill Black: Lanny Breuer’s Defense of Not Prosecuting HSBC and its Officers

Bill Black shreds not simply Lanny Breuer’s lame justification for not prosecuting HSBC officers and employees, but also by implication, Loretta Lynch’s. And the Lynch nomination reveals the deadly confines of the two party system. Elizabeth Warren made a bold speech last week in which she called for far more fundamental bank reform. She also reaffirmed her criticism of the failure to lodge criminal charges against any major bank executives. Yet as a Senator, she can’t afford to buck the Lynch nomination, since she apparently feels it would cost her too much in terms of moving the other elements of her program forward. But isn’t this arguably the most important issue?

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Bill Black: How the “Super Crunchers” Became the “Super Torturers” of Finance Data

Many of the concerns about Big Data focus on the surveillance apparatus used to collect it, or on the naive modeling approaches, like attributing causality to mere correlations. Here Black addresses an established problem: that of deliberate abuse of models.

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Should We Be Spooked by Deflation? A Look at the Historical Record

Concerns about deflation – falling prices of goods and services – are rooted in the view that it is very costly. This column tests the historical link between output growth and deflation in a sample covering 140 years for up to 38 economies. The evidence suggests that this link is weak and derives largely from the Great Depression. The authors find a stronger link between output growth and asset price deflations, particularly during postwar property price deflations. There is no evidence that high debt has so far raised the cost of goods and services price deflations, in so-called debt deflations. The most damaging interaction appears to be between property price deflations and private debt.

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