Money and The Great American Bank Robbery

As the many recent townhall meetings have shown, the American people are dealing with a few issues of trust in regards to their government and money. So I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a couple of videos on Money and what it can do — make the world go around:

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Or make it corrupt like no ones business should be able to do (<a href="https://vimeo.com/33232754">view video</a>):</p>

<a href="https://vimeo.com/33232754"><img class="alignright wp-image-17568" src="https://belowthesaltnews.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/7f24c-william-black-on-bill-moyers-journal.jpg&quot; alt="William Black explains The Great American Bank Robbery " width="417" height="283" /></a>

On Bill Moyer's Journal (<a href="http://billmoyers.com/content/william-k-black-on-u-s-financial-fraud/">article, transcript and video)</a> William Black, a former senior regulator explore how the financial industry got away with bringing the economy to its knees with The Great American Bank Robbery.

As he points out, during our current financial meltdown a single bank, IndyMac, lost more money than was lost during the entire Savings and Loan crisis. He examines the industry structures and political failures behind this economic disaster, including a pretty scathing analysis of the key players and current FOG’s, Friends of Goldman, in charge of our economic recovery. And he explains the massive fraud as well as the vast transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class that took place and continues as the federal government bails out the reckless, and quite possibly the criminal.

In his book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One (2005) Mr. Black presents a history of the Savings and Loan industry scandals of the early 1980s and lays out how dishonest CEOs, crony directors, and corrupt middlemen can systematically defeat market discipline and conceal deliberate fraud for a long time — enough to create massive damage.

Sound familiar?
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This  98 minute video interview with William Black is long, but well worth the time.  (He starts speaking at 6:12 minute mark.)

William Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Senior Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.

He currently teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, Law & Economics (all joint, multidisciplinary classes for economics and law students), and Latin American Development at University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law.

[A version of this article was crossposted at No Quarter on 8/18/09]

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Related Posts:

What We Are Feeding With Our Tax Dollars — Greed!
Bailout Bonds for Ordinary Americans?
A Skeptical Simon Johnson on The Sun King, The Inside Man, and “Too Big to Regulate”

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