Moyers Journal: Maddoff Was A Piker -- America's Big Banks Are a Far Larger Fraudulent Ponzi Scheme

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



Moyers Journal: Maddoff Was A Piker -- America's Big Banks Are a Far Larger Fraudulent Ponzi Scheme

By Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal. Posted April 6, 2009.

One of America's top bank fraud experts explains the financial industry's "liar's loans" and wholesale greed that got us in this mess.



For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s.

Black: These numbers as large as they are, vastly understate the problem of fraud.


Moyers: Bill Black was in New York this week for a conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice where scholars and journalists gathered to ask the question, "How do they get away with it?" Well, no one has asked that question more often than Bill Black. The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating -- after whom the senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named -- he sent a memo that read, in part, "get Black -- kill him dead." Metaphorically, of course. Of course. Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one -- not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters." Bill Black, welcome to the Journal.

William K. Black: Thank you.

Bill Moyers: I was taken with your candor at the conference here in New York to hear you say that this crisis we're going through, this economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?

Black: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/135161/moyers_journal%3A_maddoff_was_a_piker_--_america%27s_big_banks_are_a_far_larger_fraudulent_ponzi_scheme/

[midnight]

1. Exactly. He was the sand they through in our faces, so the real

big rats could go on as if nothing "they did" was remotely significant. Go get them.

[MissMillie]

2. what got me the most on this

is that there is apparently a law that says the U.S. is supposed to take these failing banks into receivership... it was done under Reagan (of course no one then called it "Nationalizing banks" then.