Video: William K. Black, The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One
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Interview Video: William K. Black with Democracy Now Broadcast October 15.
Text from Democracy Now:
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average has topped 10,000 for the first time in a year, as JPMorgan Chase reported massive profits in the third quarter. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that major US banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year—a record high. But on Main Street, foreclosures are also at record levels, and the official unemployment rate is expected to top ten percent. We speak to former bank regulator William Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.
See also:
William Black Charges Geithner, Summers & Obama With Banking Cover-Up
William K. Black: The Great American Bank Robbery
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Thank you!
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JUAN GONZALEZ: And William Black, where is the outrage? It seems to me, at this stage, with the—as the foreclosures continue to escalate in numbers, and yet we’re seeing these enormous profits less than a year after the financial crisis. There doesn’t seem to be the kind of outrage, even in Congress, that there was six months or eight months ago.
WILLIAM BLACK: There’s no palpable outrage, certainly not in Congress. The reform efforts on derivatives, for example, are a scandal. They exempt virtually all of the problem derivatives, and they’re designed to exempt it. And that’s the bill that’s introduced, and of course it’s likely to get worse with additional lobbying from the special interests.
Link the things that you’ve just been talking about. You talked about foreclosures reaching record highs. But in fact, foreclosures, relative to delinquencies, are quite low compared to historical ratios. In other words, banks have tons of folks who are not paying their mortgages on time, and they’re not foreclosing. And the reason they’re not foreclosing is, once you foreclose, you have to recognize losses under the accounting rules. And the banks gimmicked the accounting rules. They put pressure on Congress, and Congress put pressure on the accounting profession to gimmick the accounting rules now about a year ago. Now, these bonuses, of course, are paid compared to alleged profits. What happens if you understate your losses dramatically? You report much higher profits and much higher bonuses. So this is a web of fraud, in which they are getting as much as they can before the place goes to hell in a handbasket again.
AMY GOODMAN: William Black, talk about Timothy Geithner. Talk about Lawrence Summers. Talk about Obama’s inner circle and what they have to gain from this.
WILLIAM BLACK: Well, I mean, Summers, for example—you talked about Geithner’s aides and how much money they had made, and, of course, it’s absurdly large, and they’re making it typically for not doing much of anything. But they’re taking their cue from Summers, who got $5 million, roughly, for working one day a week in areas he had no expertise. So, you know, once you leave the federal service, then these interests that you were very helpful to find a way to make you spectacularly rich, and they know that that’s what’s coming in their future. That’s part of the problem.
But the bigger part of the problem, in many ways, is that they have such an ideology about the market and its ability to deal with all problems that has no basis in reality, has been exposed in this crisis as completely fictional, and yet they can’t give it up. I mean, think of yourself as one of these professors who’s been trained in the Milton Friedmanish views, and you’re in your fifties, and you’ve been saying—you know, everything you’ve said in your career is wrong. Everything you’ve learned in your career is wrong. All of your areas of expertise are wrong. Are you going to admit that? “Hi, I’ve been misleading you, and I’m sorry I caused this disaster. And by the way, I have no meaningful skills or experience.”
AMY GOODMAN: Would Alan Greenspan—
WILLIAM BLACK: It’s not going to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: —fit into that picture?
WILLIAM BLACK: Well, Alan Greenspan, of course, is doing this when he’s in his eighties and isn’t going to teach and isn’t going to do anything else. And even then, he didn’t volunteer it. He was asked pointed questions in front of Congress.
And that comes back to your point: where’s the congressional outrage there? There is some. We work with some of the progressives. You may have seen, your listeners may well have seen Representative Grayson asking very difficult questions. Representative Kaptur has certainly been on people. But that’s a tiny minority of folks within Congress. And it comes back, of course, to campaign contributions. And the Supreme Court is about to make that much worse. It’s almost certainly going to strike down the portions of McCain-Feingold that restricted corporate contributions, and it’s “Katy, bar the door.”
JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you to go back to this issue of the foreclosures and delinquencies, which you make the point that the delinquencies are much higher. For instance, I think the delinquency rate for prime loans, not for the subprime or even the Alt-A or the more questionable loans, but for prime loans, rose to 6.41 percent in the second quarter from six percent, so that you’re getting supposedly the best loans in the home mortgage market are now at these very, very high rates of delinquency. What does this say about the future for these banks that are holding these loans?
WILLIAM BLACK: Well, it means that many of these banks are deeply insolvent and actually losing money, but they have the gimmicked accounting, so they’re able to report that they have lots of profits.
And, by the way, the other thing they’re doing is speculating like crazy and other trading activities that add absolutely nothing to economic value. So, if they’re winning, somebody’s losing. Right? They’re doing bond trading, and they’re producing allegedly billions of dollars in profits in bond trading. Well, somebody’s the counterparty and losing money. And so, there’s going to be other bad news outside the financial sector.
And again, remember, financial sector exists supposedly for one purpose—to help the real economy—and it’s taking billions out of the real economy in trading profits. So the combination of these things, both in the financial sector and in the real economy, means very bad things down the road, in terms of increased business failures, increased banking failures.
But, of course, we’re not allowing the large banks to fail. In a part of his speech that was almost completely ignored, and it’s incredibly radical, but in the right word—you know, right drift range, Geithner said twice that for the largest banks we now have a program of capital insurance—not deposit insurance, capital insurance. In other words, we’re going to stand in there and bail out the shareholders, no matter how badly management screws up the place, even if management screws it up through fraud. And that’s just an appalling change in America.
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Thank you!
Oct 19, 2009 at 5:00 PM
Reader Comments (18)
"Krugman Blames Reagan"
DB, that one is for you.
the video starts automatically at 12 minutes for me...
http://blogs.wsj.com/bankruptcy/2009/10/19/lehman-deal-pearls-before-swine/
In the frantic hours before Barclays Plc sought bankruptcy court approval to buy most of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s assets last year, executives at both firms were concerned the deal would fall apart if the U.K. bank acted “like pigs” in picking over Lehman’s carcass.
Serious Manipulation also occurs in the Gold and Silver Markets via the COMEX.
Serious Manipulation also occurs in the Canadian Markets as well, targeting the natural resource stocks.
The second American revolution has already started, the first shot has already been fired.
Which reporter will cover it first?
In my opinion...
The bankers make the financial rules (for the time being).
The bankers don't want the public to buy anything they are not selling.
When the bankers are ready to sell their gold, then they will order many thousands of financial advisors around the world to sell the US dollar and buy gold.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3290ab3e-bc16-11de-9426-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aoHhSaJptk8o
Greenlight Capital manager David Einhorn said Monday that his hedge-fund firm is betting on the possibility of a major currency collapse and a surge in interest rates, citing ballooning government deficits in some of the world's most developed countries.
The hedge-fund manager, who warned about Lehman Brothers' frailty before it collapsed last year, also said financial institutions that are deemed as "too big to fail," such as Citigroup Inc. (C), should be broken up.
Greenlight has been buying physical gold this year because Einhorn is concerned that efforts to save the financial system and fuel economic recovery are undermining the ...
“People want to kill somebody, but they don’t know who to shoot at,” says Russell Cunningham, past president of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a6QpSf.s4NaA
Unfortunately since his departure those who have followed have proven to be simply Wall Street whores who have adopted a policy of plundering the U.S. dollar, creating more and more greenbacks to combat(or should i say feed)the serial bubble mindset.
I find it quite ironic the Federal Reserve defiantly fights impartial interventions, audits in the name of independence. Claiming their policies, objectivity should never be compromised by outside influences.
Who are they kidding? Is there a bigger political hack, puppet to Wall Street and our largest banks than the Federal Reserve?
Look no further than the present state of our economy, employment, falling dollar and standard of living. The long list of zombi banks, unbridled corruption to determine the success of this miserable failure called the Federal Reserve.
It's going to get ugly, very.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHGzWFyYGNw&feature=player_embedded#
Niall Ferguson: U.S. Empire in Decline, on Collision Course with China
Posted Oct 20, 2009 07:30am EDT by Aaron Task in Newsmakers
The U.S. is an empire in decline, according to Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor and author of The Ascent of Money.
"People have predicted the end of America in the past and been wrong," Ferguson concedes. "But let's face it: If you're trying to borrow $9 trillion to save your financial system...and already half your public debt held by foreigners, it's not really the conduct of rising empires, is it?"
Given its massive deficits and overseas military adventures, America today is similar to the Spanish Empire in the 17th century and Britain's in the 20th, he says. "Excessive debt is usually a predictor of subsequent trouble."
Putting a finer point on it, Ferguson says America today is comparable to Britain circa 1900: a dominant empire underestimating the rise of a new power. In Britain's case back then it was Germany; in America's case today, it's China.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/357319/Niall-Ferguson-U.S.-Empire-in-Decline-on-Collision-Course-with-China?tickers=FXI,PGJ,^GSPC,^dji,SPY,LMT,RTN&sec=topStories&pos=9&asset=&ccode=
Via: Boston Globe:
The Secret Service is tracking a far broader range of possible threats to the nation’s leaders, the officials said, even as it also investigates financial crimes such as counterfeiting as part of its original mandate.
The new demands are leading some officials, both inside and outside the agency, to raise the possibility of the service curtailing or dropping its role in fighting financial crime to focus more on protecting leaders and their families from assassination attempts and thwarting terrorist plots aimed at high-profile events.
Ron Paul
Campaign For Liberty
Tuesday, Oct 20th, 2009
With a faltering economy, multiple wars, and the approaching demise of the dollar’s reserve status, there are more than enough problems to keep politicians in Washington working day and night. In between handing out cash for clunkers and nationalizing healthcare, the administration is busy sending more troops overseas, escalating existing wars, and seeking out excuses to start new wars. Congress is working on “urgent” legislation to address crises like healthcare reform and climate change. The reforms are so very urgent that legislation must pass swiftly with no time to read the bills even though the new laws wouldn’t take effect for several years! Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is busy dealing with our dollar crisis by printing up more dollars.
Our Commander in chief is Kaptur not Chicago Mob shill(Obama Criminal)
Time to grow balls , be brave , unite and revolt now
Hijacked Governments Legalizing Corporate Crimes, NWO Mafia Criminals Exposed by Marcy Kaptur
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5GkbZtDE5I
"Wall street just robbed the biggest bank of them all - the PUBLIC TREASURY" Kaptur in Congress!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2z00CQLUdw&feature=related
Kaptur calls Pelosi, Paulson CRIMINALS!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeVY7JH_xVU&feature=related
The US Is Now Under Martial Law!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e48LvvqZ2KQ&feature=related
Lt. Col. Craig Roberts on The Alex Jones Show"The Coming U.N.Invasion"1/4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXJF4zKVJTA&feature=related
Nothing but Revolt will set us free from clutches of Home Grown Financial AL Qaeda now
Revolt or scream in Debt Hell pit=Debt Slaves
The arbitrage opportunity pointed out above is a manifestation of an overvalued dollar compared to gold and a world economy with serious distortions in product, labor, and capital markets. They are two sides of the same coin: the financial side and the real economy side. These distortions have built up over decades as many countries manipulated their economies while their central bankers aided and abetted the dollar. A great deal of restructuring lies ahead.
America is down. Is she out? America is capable of putting her house in order. She has great strengths lodged in her people. It is not too late to resuscitate the American economy and revive its vitality. Will the proper policies and radical system changes be instituted to accomplish that challenge? Unfortunately, there are no current signals to that effect being given off by America’s ruling elite. We are seeing the very opposite. Foreign leaders can read these negative signals as well as we can. They are acting accordingly. They are starting to dethrone the dollar.
http://oversight.house.gov/contact/
http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.ContactForm
http://financialservices.house.gov/contact.html
Now these Blood Sucking pests in Washington started blocking my comments
Fellow Americans: Give them hell with all the facts you all post here at Dailybail by posting on above web links......
Why Our Massive Debt Will Kill Us in the End
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/21/us-afghanistan-banking-idUSKBN0LP08S20150221
(Reuters) - Staff at a branch of Afghanistan's central bank in southern Kandahar province may have got away with as much as 81 million Afghanis ($1.4 million) when they robbed their own bank and ran, an official said on Saturday.
Security cameras showed the bank's vault had been cleaned out, but investigators were waiting to gain access before confirming the total missing, he said.
"Yesterday we could only open one of the treasury's doors. We hope to open the next one today," the central bank director for Afghanistan's southwestern region, Fazel Ahmad Azimi, said.
Weak regulation undermines confidence in Afghanistan's fragile banking system, which has yet to fully recover from a 2010 scandal over a bank that collapsed triggering a financial crisis.
An international financial watchdog last year threatened to place Afghanistan on a blacklist and has since warned it needs to do more to enforce laws to regulate its banking sector.
The Kandahar raid is believed to have been carried out by a senior official at the bank, an employee of nine years, with the help of his son and brother-in-law who were also on staff, according to Azimi.