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William K Black , J.D., Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Bill Black has testified before the Senate Agricultural Committee on the regulation of financial derivatives and House Governance Committee on the regulation of executive compensation. He was interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS, which went viral. He gave an invited lecture at UCLA’s Hammer Institute which, when the video was posted on the web, drew so many “hits†that it crashed the UCLA server. He appeared extensively in Michael Moore’s most recent documentary: “Capitalism: A Love Story.†He was featured in the Obama campaign release discussing Senator McCain’s role in the “Keating Five.†(Bill took the notes of that meeting that led to the Senate Ethics investigation of the Keating Five. His testimony was highly critical of all five Senators’ actions.) He is a frequent guest on local, national, and international television and radio and is quoted as an expert by the national and international print media nearly every week. He was the subject of featured interviews in Newsweek, Barron’s, and Village Voice. He is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, and c–founder of Bank Whistleblowers United.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 18, 2013 The Incredible Con the Banksters Pulled on the FBI
focus on the brilliant con that the mortgage lending industry was able to pull on the FBI because the banking regulatory agencies and the SEC failed to provide the FBI with the expertise
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 31, 2014 The Greek Depression, the Troika, and the New York Times (videos)
As I have explained in prior articles, there is an excellent chance that the Troika's infliction of austerity on the eurozone's periphery could, as with the austerity inflicted under the Washington Consensus, continue to produce such long-term rolling recessions. The media still supports such measures, but not the people.
(75 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 14, 2015 What if the Public Understood How Money Works?
There's something invigorating about people freaking out about modern monetary theory (MMT). They treat MMT as akin to the Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones movie.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 8, 2015 The New York Times Urges the Troika to "Make an Example of Greece"
It is often the moral and economic blindness of New York Times articles about the EU crisis that is most striking. The newest entry in this field is entitled "Now Europe Must Decide Whether to Make an Example of Greece."
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 6, 2014 New York City: Aggressive "Broken Windows" Policing but Carte Blanche for Banksters
New York City exemplifies two perverse criminal justice policies that drive many criminologists to distraction. It is the home of the most destructive epidemics of elite financial frauds in history.
The "strategy" of ignoring or even praising the banksters' enormous frauds while aggressively arresting the poor for the most minor of property offenses is obviously indefensible on every conceivable basis.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, November 15, 2013 Will the Chilean People Save the U.S. by Electing Michelle Bachelet?
The effort by corporate CEOs to dominate the global economy and global government is reaching the end-game stage. Corporate CEOs view government and democracy as their gravest threats and are constantly seeking to discredit and hamstring government and democratic decision-making. CEOs are particularly eager to discredit, destroy, or capture regulation and they have enlisted enormous support in both major U.S. parties...
(14 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 30, 2012 The Great Betrayal -- and the Cynicism of calling it a Grand Bargain
Obama is telling the media that the Great Betrayal is his first, and overarching, priority should he be re-elected. We are forewarned and we must act now to make clear that we will block the Great Betrayal and crush at the polls any member of Congress who supports it.
(10 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 15, 2013 Banksters Love Holder; The FBI's 2010 Mortgage Fraud Report Reveals Why
DOJ has refused to prosecute any elite banker for mortgage fraud.
The Obama administration's refusal to prosecute the elite banksters... has made it clear that the rule of law no longer applies to wide ranges of life and that crony capitalism will continue to reign.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 5, 2013 The "Hyper-meritocracy" -- an Oxymoron Led by Criminal Morons
We do not live in a "winner-take-all" Nation. We increasingly live in a "cheater-take-all" system.
This column was prompted by William Galston's review of Tyler Cowen's new book Average is Over. Galston's column worries about the huge, permanent underclass that Cowen envisions will grow in the United States. I write to challenge Cowen's assumption that winners will prevail through a process of "hyper-meritocracy."
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 12, 2014 Why the Worst Get on Top -- in Economics and as CEOs
Von Hayek implicitly assumes that corrupt CEOs will not control and abuse any political system. Under his own logic CEOs can use the seeming legitimacy, power, and wealth of "their" corporations to serve directly as these demagogues or fund and control proxy demagogues that will serve their interests.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 16, 2014 The 11th Lesson We Need to Learn from Charles Keating's Frauds: Bring back Glass-Steagall
One of the subtle aspects of the savings and loan debacle that is that we ran a real world test of the importance of the provisions of the 1933 Banking Act known as the Glass-Steagall Act. Unfortunately, Glass-Steagall was doomed by the combination of politicians eager for campaign contributions from big finance and theoclassical economists who inhabit a fantasy-based world of dogma that ignored the results. Series: Banking (18 Articles, 50685 views)
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 11, 2015 Hillary Remains Clueless About Regulation on the 28th Anniversary of the Keating Five Meeting
Hillary Remains Clueless About Regulation on the 28th Anniversary of the Keating Five Meeting.
But the Clintons and their bankster allies learned something far worse -- the need to push the three "de's" to ensure that never again would banksters and their political cronies be prevented from looting "their" banks or be held accountable for their looting.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 2, 2016 Policing as a Tool of Systemic Racism
In order to understand the discussion of blood libels I need to provide the reader with a very brief overview of the key policing practices most relevant to race. This thumbnail history is necessary to understand a series of paradoxes that I will discuss in this series of articles. These paradoxes often are critical to understanding the intersection of police, policing, crime, gender, age, and race.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 24, 2014 The EU Center-Right and Ultra-Right's Continuing War on the People of the EU
The New York Times has provided us with an invaluable column about the interactions of the EU's rightist and ultra-rightest parties. It is invaluable because it is (unintentionally) so revealing about the EU's right and ultra-right parties and the NYT's inability to understand either the EU economic or political crises. Series: Banking (18 Articles, 50685 views), Economic Reform (99 Articles, 298970 views)
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, November 18, 2013 Why Does the Media Ignore Timothy Geithner's Disastrous Leadership of the NY Fed?
Remember nine months ago when Timothy Geithner assured us that it was "extremely unlikely" he would take a position on Wall Street? Something else intrigued me as soon as I heard that Geithner was cashing in at Warburg Pincus -- I remembered that I had debated a former leader of that firm about Geithner.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 23, 2014 If New York Times Reporters Won’t Read Krugman about Austerity Will they Read Brooks?
NYT columns discussing austerity, particularly in the eurozone, demonstrate that its reporters religiously avoid reading Krugman's scores of columns on austerity.
I have written repeatedly about the New York Times' needs to create a prize in incompetence in macroeconomic reporting (IMR) and suggested that the paper award the IMR prize to its reporters.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 8, 2013 The Faux Hyper-Meritocracy that Threatens to Destroy Us
Two prior columns about Tyler Cowen's praise of the faux "hyper-meritocracy." Cowen assumes that productivity determines personal wealth and is measured by wealth. The support of the wealthy for austerity in response to the Great Recession demonstrates that the wealthy remained the problem even after their frauds drove the crisis. They sought a policy that would have compounded the Great Recession (as it did in the Eurozone).
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 30, 2014 It's Good - no - Great to be the CEO Running a Huge Criminal Bank
You know what happened; no senior banker or bank was prosecuted. No banker was sued civilly by the government. No banker had to pay back his bonus that he "earned" through fraud.
Every day brings multiple new scandals. At least they used to be scandals. Now they're simply news items strained of ethical content by business journalists who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak not about evil.
(22 comments) SHARE Friday, October 21, 2016 Plutocrats Brag: We Win Because You Fail to Vote
The New Democrats and their Republican counterparts' economic policies have created a rigged system of crony capitalism. Crony capitalism produces devastating epidemics of elite fraud that have shrunk the overall economic "pie" and distributed the "pie" overwhelmingly in favor of corrupt corporate elites like Donald Trump and their political cronies like the Clintons.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 19, 2014 AG Holder: "The U.S. Announces the Indictment of Citigroup's Senior Officers for Fraud"
The third omission from Attorney General Eric Holder's press conference announcing the settlement with Citigroup of civil charges was the words "criminal" and "indictment."
According to DOJ's Statements there should have been Numerous Indictments
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 6, 2014 The Kamikaze Economics and Politics of Forcing Austerity on the Ukraine
So, our strategy is to play into Putin’s hands by inflicting austerity and turning the Ukraine into “a Western hell.†Not to worry says our man in Kiev. Playing into Putin's hands by inflicting austerity on the Ukraine and producing "hell" is ludicrous.
The Ukraine faces severe problems beyond Russia and its energy dependence on Russia.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 18, 2014 Obama Imports and Immunizes Banksters Who Donate to the Democratic Party
It's not bad enough that Obama refuses to prosecute our banksters who grew wealthy by leading the three financial fraud epidemics that cost the U.S. over $20 trillion in lost GDP and over 10 million jobs -- he's now importing Ecuador's banksters.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 16, 2014 The Most Dishonest Number in the World: LIBOR
The FDIC has sued 16 of the largest banks in the world plus the British Bankers Association (BBA) alleging that they engaged in fraud and collusion to manipulate the London Inter-bank Offered Rate (LIBOR). BBA called LIBOR "The most important number in the world."
LIBOR is actually many numbers that depend on the currency and term (maturity) of the loan. The collusion involved manipulating most of these rates.
SHARE Tuesday, April 29, 2014 The New Book on Regulation I Just Decided to Write: Blame it on Monaco
Theoclassical economists have mounted an unholy war to discredit and intimidate regulation and regulators -- and to replace them with anti-regulators -- for over a century. This is the third article in a series of columns devoted to financial regulation prompted by the comments of a Swiss academic at the XIIth Annual CIFA Forum in Monaco.
SHARE Wednesday, April 8, 2015 The Libertarian Plea to Bring Back Jim Crow: An Oxymoron
Yes, there are few things better designed to increase "liberty" than to encourage merchants to refuse service to whatever groups they hate.
According to conservatives, every leading candidate for the Republican Party's nomination for the presidency rushed to embrace the right of merchants to discriminate in the Indiana Act as originally passed.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 26, 2017 The New Democrats' Addiction to Austerity Will Not Die
the Democrats should never mimic the Republicans' dishonesty, hysteria, and willingness to inflict austerity on the people of America and the world.
Unfortunately, the New Democrats embraced the economic malpractice of austerity with the passion of a convert.
(12 comments) SHARE Monday, October 28, 2013 Economics could be a Science if More Economists were Scientists
Chetty thinks critics who point out that economists don't achieve science even though they purport to aspire to it are "unfair and uninformed."
In this article I respond to Chetty's effort to defend economists. The "recipe" for accounting control fraud by a lender has four ingredients...
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 28, 2016 BREXIT Part 2: Roger Cohen's column on Brexit
Roger Cohen published a column decrying BREXIT.
Yes, "Project Fear" failed in its goal of intimidating voters. It isn't simply the "politicians" that failed, it was the "experts" -- the elites that rig the system in finance and the ideologues who create the self-inflicted wounds of EU austerity -- who designed the failed policies and grew wealthier and more powerful because of those policies.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 26, 2016 Debt Derangement Syndrome: Saving Our Grandkids from Wall Street
Pete Peterson is back, and his message and rhetoric are always the same. The federal budget deficit is a disaster and -- any day now -- will produce massive inflation. Peterson has written his 20,000th version of this fantasy in the NYT with Paul Volcker. The first rhetorical game that Paulson plays is to assert that it is bad for a sovereign nation to run budgetary deficits because they are not "sound and sustainable."
SHARE Saturday, May 9, 2015 Prime Minister Cameron's "Southern Strategy" Wins (and Loses)
I write to emphasize the lunacy of the parties opposed to the Tories demonizing the Scots as an election strategy -- and the failure of the media to condemn Cameron for his divisive version of (in U.S. terms) "the Southern strategy."
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 17, 2013 Higher Bank Capital Requirements are Necessary but not Sufficient
Higher Bank Capital Requirements are Necessary but not Sufficient.
The last ditch efforts to save Larry Summers' prospective nomination to run the Fed and the comments about his withdrawing from consideration have prompted further discussions of financial regulation.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, October 18, 2013 Why is The Economist Chortling over the Prospect of Oil Pollution in Ecuador?
One of The Economist Magazine's perennial hates is President Rafael Correa of Ecuador. Correa, an economist, has committed the unforgivable offense of succeeding through economic policies that The Economist despises. This is strange because Correa's four foundational policies are expanded health care, expanded education, improved infrastructure, and encouraging entrepreneurs by reducing the time and cost of starting a business
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 2, 2014 Jamie Dimon's $10 Million Raise is a "Common Sense" Fraud Reward
Modern executive compensation was a leading creator of the criminogenic environment that produced the epidemics of accounting control fraud that destroyed the global financial system.
Andrew Ross Sorkin seemed to have built an insurmountable lead in the race to be declared the most unctuous panderer to the financial plutocrats who grew wealthy by leading the frauds that blew up the economy, but he has new competition.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, March 9, 2015 McCloskey Wants to Change the Title and the Substance of Her Article on Corruption
Deirdre McCloskey has responded with two comments to my series of articles critiquing her book review in the Wall Street Journal of two new books about corruption.
The harm done by these crimes is so severe that these topics well warrant extended discussion and debate.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 9, 2014 GM's Cartoon Version of von Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" -- on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day
Thank God that GM warned us all, decades ago, so that we could take a hard right exit off the road to serfdom. Please repeat after me the GM mantra of freedom.
As a further act of unintentional self-parody, a libertarian blogger chose the 70th anniversary of D-Day to post GM's cartoon. The cartoon's premise is the supposed absurdity of the government being competent to plan anything.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 22, 2014 Liar's Loans Ain't "Rocket Science"
From the fraudulent controlling officers who are the bank's decision-makers perspective, however, liar's loans are ideal.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 20, 2014 The WSJ's Editorial Posing as "News" about Ecuador
the Wall Street Journal has poured out its pain that the people of Ecuador might reelect President Rafael Correa.
The WSJ lets slip the "opposition's" real concerns -- the people of Ecuador strongly support Correa's policies and oppose the return of the oligarchs to power. The oligarchs are desperate to make it impossible for the people of Ecuador to reelect the leader they support.
SHARE Wednesday, February 3, 2016 How Many Lies Can the WSJ Pack into a Chart on Liar's Loans?
How Many Lies Can the WSJ Pack into a Chart on Liar's Loans?
This is the second article in my series prompted by the Wall Street Journal report that "big money managers" want to bring back "liar's loans." Given that the best study of liar's loans during the crisis found a fraud incidence of 90% -- this is a startling proof of how openly addicted to fraud the "big money managers" remain.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 1, 2014 Key House Republicans Almost Get Accounting Control Fraud
To prepare myself for a guest lecture to a class at the University of Kansas I did some research about the House Financial Services Committee, now chaired by Jeb Hensarling (R. TX). I was pleased to learn that the Committee's home page emphasizes the key role that accounting control fraud played at Fannie and Freddie. A description of how such fraud occurs, follows.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 11, 2013 The SEC Flacks Paint Lehman's Looters as the Victims of a "Political" SEC
This is the second installment in a three-part series correcting the NYT propaganda that seeks to transmute the SEC's refusal to hold any of Lehman's looters accountable for their myriad frauds. For the purposes of this article I assume that the reporters have accurately represented the SEC officials' positions. I discuss the journalists' analytical flaws.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, May 19, 2014 We've Known for 75 Years Why GM Killing Customers Isn't Treated as "Real Crime"
The recent NY Times article does not report on the number of people who were injured and killed because GM designed a defective ignition system, knowingly hid the defect from its customers and the government, and once it knew that its defective design was injuring and killing its customers GM deliberately covered up the existence of the defect and the cause of the easily avoidable injuries and deaths.
SHARE Monday, October 7, 2013 Bank Failures are "Inconceivable" under the Latest Neoclassical Fantasy
Only theoclassical economics constantly recycles variants of its worst ideas that have proven disastrous when they have influenced policy. Other fields advance because they embrace the scientific method. The theoclassical theory is, as always, the creation of "private market discipline" to prevent bank failures. The most catastrophic bank failures are "accounting control frauds."
SHARE Thursday, February 16, 2017 Andrew Ross Sorkin's Attempt to Make Tim Geithner a Hero
I am watching the film Too Big to Fail based on Andrew Ross Sorkin's book of the same name. It led me to check out the price of the used book, which has fallen to $1.02, which is low enough that I am willing to buy a copy of the book, particularly since not a penny will go to Andrew Ross Sorkin.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 11, 2014 Survey of Bankers Unintentionally Documents their Depravity
Each year, the survey unintentionally documents how depraved senior bankers are as a group. They come to praise Caesar, but end up burying him in a garbage dump.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 13, 2014 Geithner's Other Ad Hominem Attacks Against Barofsky
In my first article on Timothy Geithner I exposed the revealing and disgusting nature of his bizarre ad hominem attack on Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program for the great sin of providing his law enforcement officers with side arms and protective vests. In this article I discuss very briefly his other two ad hominem attacks on Barofsky and his staff.
SHARE Monday, August 19, 2013 Obama's FBI Channels the Tea Party: Partner with the Banks and Blame the Poor for the Crisis
why the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have failed to investigate and prosecute successfully the largest and most destructive financial fraud epidemic in history.
This is the third column in my series discussing why the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have failed to investigate and prosecute successfully the largest and most destructive financial fraud epidemic in history.
SHARE Wednesday, April 20, 2016 Too Big to Fail From the Eyes of a Specialist
Dr. William Black concludes: "One of the reasons we, the Bank Whistleblowers United, proposed getting rid of the systemically dangerous institutions through the use of banking regulators' powers...is that it allows vastly quicker remedial action than the cumbersome FSOC procedure that took over two years to designate MetLife as posing a systemic risk."
Black is an economic advisor to Bernie Sanders.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 12, 2014 Yes, Theoclassical "Economists [are] Basically Immoral"
The failures of theoclassical economists and economics are total and myriad. Many of their theories are long-falsified dogmas. Their methodological preference is econometrics -- which gives the worst possible results in bubbles and when accounting control fraud epidemics occur.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, September 9, 2013 Creating Effective Regulation is the Imperative Issue at the Federal Reserve
The only positive aspect of the public contest to pick a successor for Ben Bernanke that the White House has inexplicably sparked is that economists are acknowledging that the next head of the Fed must act to create (not "restore") effective regulation by the agency. It is long past time to have a serious discussion about the collapse of regulation by the Fed.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, January 27, 2017 Not 4 Sale: A Principle and a Slogan for Real Democrats
This article explains three critical reasons why the Democratic Party's leaders are far more insane than all but a few Democrats understand. It focuses on the leaders of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the New Democrats.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 23, 2013 JPMorgan: Fish Rot from the Head
The New York Times' spin of the tentative settlement of JPMorgan's latest myriad felonies begins early and runs throughout the article. JPMorgan and Attorney General Eric Holder have reached a common meme on their settlement he Department of Justice (DOJ) and Holder are stalwarts who have demonstrated their toughness and JPMorgan is a model corporate citizen.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 8, 2014 The Troika and the New York Times Bury the Issues, not just the Lead
The troika made Spain its poster child for the success of austerity in late 2013. In early 2014 Spain admitted that unemployment had risen to 26 percent. The “recovery†they hope for is that Spain, by 2024, will exit the “crisis†stage.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 8, 2014 It's Long Past Time for Krugman to Name and Shame NYT's Eurozone Reportage
the New York Times authoring another of its endless articles that assumes that austerity is essential to a eurozone recovery. My problems are with the NYT reporters ignoring Krugman's views -- views shared by the great bulk of economists -- and with their failure to question whether austerity is the proper response to a recession.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 2, 2014 Dr. Draghi Prescribes a Dose of Deflation for Spain as his latest Quack Cure
This morning brought two April Fools' Day articles about France and Italy that are also about the gratuitous second Great Recession (in the core) & the second Great Depression (in Spain, Italy, and Greece) inflicted by the troika's infamous austerity dogmas. In conjunction with quotations from Draghi’s fellow troika-trolls in the articles about France and Italy, they reveal the troika’s fanatical devotion to failed dogma.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 15, 2015 It Would be Well if Economics Were Modest for it has Much to be Modest About
This post comments on an article by the French economist Gilles Saint-Paul that embodies why economics is the only field that purports to be a science that has gotten worse for decades, which actively makes the world worse in its supposed area of expertise, and that is proud of it
SHARE Tuesday, June 10, 2014 The Criminology of the "Sure Thing" Portrayed as "Risk"
John Coates, a former derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs is now a researcher. He wrote a column in the New York Times entitled "The Biology of Risk" that I hope will be widely read.
Coates' description of the crisis as triggered by a biologically-induced excessive risk-aversion on the part of traders rests on a failure to understand why varieties of financial risk are vastly different.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 30, 2016 Announcing the Bank Whistleblowers' Group's Initial Proposals
Announcing the Bank Whistleblowers' Group. so we ask each presidential candidate -- which portions of the Whistleblowers' 60-Day plan will you pledge to implement? We hope the candidates will commit to breaking Wall Street's power over our economy and democracy.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 10, 2013 Not with a Bang but a Whimper -- the SEC Enforcement Team's Propaganda Campaign
The New York Times has one of those "inside" stories that unintentionally demonstrate the collapse of justice and financial reporting.
The entire piece is one extended leak by the SEC's enforcement leadership which has been severely criticized for its failure to recover the fraudulent profits that elite Wall Street bankers obtained by running the control frauds.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 22, 2014 DOJ Trains AUSAs to Chase Mice While Lions Roam the Campsite
Holder made Wagner DOJ's leader on mortgage fraud because Wagner was so willing to propagate the single most absurd, destructive, but so very useful (to the administration and the banksters) lie about mortgage fraud.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 1, 2014 The Eurozone's "Nascent" Recovery
The Eurozone has decided to ring out January with more bad news about the economy, but the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both end their articles with claims that things are actually going pretty darn well.
The NYT refers to the eurozone "recovery" as "nascent."
The reality of both news reports is that what the data actually "display" are "signs of weakness."
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 4, 2014 The Troika Continues to Harm the Eurozone and the WSJ continues to Miss the Story
The ECB's failure tells us something enormously important about what is wrong with the eurozone's economy and the troika's bleeding of that economy through austerity. Indeed, its failure has been growing steadily.
(Ed. Note: In Economics, Demand is defined as the desire or need for goods and services AND the ability to pay for it. Actual Demand is only the first part and exists all the time).
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, November 1, 2013 The Taylor Rule: Ignore Fraud Epidemics and Worship Markets
In virtually every case, the economists who purported to study natural experiments by "testing precise hypotheses" implicitly excluded control fraud as a possible explanatory variable.
Every day provides multiple examples of the blinders imposed by economists' dogmas reducing their purportedly scientific studies about finance to exercises in self-parody.
SHARE Wednesday, June 28, 2017 Those to Blame for the Grenfell Fire Victims Include Tony Blair
There are many people culpable for the mass loss of life in the Grenfell fire in London. At this time, we know enough about the fire and its causes to be able to discuss these matters with sufficient confidence to draw preliminary conclusions.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, September 23, 2013 The Wall Street Journal Pines for the Return of Liar's Loans
The Dodd-Frank Act bans liar's loans. The WSJ considers this ban so appalling, so obvious a violation of the divine right of banks, that it labels it "micromanage[ment]" and assumes that the label proves the absurdity of banning liar's loans.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 18, 2014 The New York Times' Coverage of EU Austerity Remains Pathetic
I have explained in depth why the New York Times' coverage of the EU troika's infliction of austerity on the eurozone is dishonest and routinely indifferent to the suffering of the peoples of much of the periphery who have been forced into a second Great Depression. The latest travesty was in an article entitled "French Premier's Push Toward Center Opens Rift on the Left."
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 9, 2013 UPI Treats Monetary Fiction as Fact: Sows the Seeds of the GOP's Efforts to Cause a Recession
In this article I elaborate on yesterday's article that noted scholars' logical incoherence of the belief of the wealthy that reducing the federal budget deficit, in response to the Great Recession, was the most important problem facing America, and my strong support for the opposite policy view that the federal government should run budget deficits as a counter-cyclical fiscal policy to a recession.
SHARE Sunday, October 26, 2014 The New York Times Finally Allows Competent EU Commentators
In the last two days, however, the NYT has given space to an outsider and a newly hired journalist not from the EU beat to write about EU austerity. Each column contain more blunt truths than six years of the NYT's regular coverage of EU austerity -- combined.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 4, 2014 EU Austerity as Frat House Hazing
Yes, the EU is now officially a fraternity, and austerity is its hazing ritual. Yes, they know that austerity is stupid, juvenile, and dangerous, but, hey, they had to suffer it so everybody else should as well.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 20, 2014 Italian's Apology for German Austerity Diktats Lasts 24 Hours
The German austerity diktat forced the entire Eurozone into a second, gratuitous Great Recession and Italy, Greece and Spain into unemployment levels last seen in the Great Depression
SHARE Thursday, January 8, 2015 EU Deflation Arrives and the Troika Continues to Fiddle While the EU Burns
Both papers are aflutter today with news that the Eurozone fell into deflation. We have been trying for months to explain that there is nothing magic about the harm caused by deflation (as opposed to very low levels of inflation).
SHARE Thursday, November 21, 2013 We have Passed the Economic Tipping Point in Achieving Marriage Equality
On Marriage equality, employing my economics "hat" I wish to offer this encouragement -- we have passed the tipping point in economics that ensures eventual success in securing marriage equality throughout the United States.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 1, 2014 Implicitly Assuming that the CEO is Not a Crook Misses the Problem
Gretchen Morgenson has brought a revealing study to the attention of the public in her article entitled "The CEO is My Friend, So Back Off." Here's the bad news -- the situation is vastly worse than the authors of the study conclude and the policy advice that experts offered Morgenson in response to the findings would fail where they were most needed.
Company CEOs typically provide a thin veneer of faux ethical trappings...
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 29, 2013 The Oil Oligarchs Want Me to Know How Much They Hate President Correa
Gustavo Coronel, a Venezuelan oil oligarch associated with Cato has written to let me know how much he despises Ecuador's President Rafael Correa.
Coronel has declared that one of my columns "made a failed attempt to whitewash the President of Ecuador, Correa, who is violating environmentally fragile areas of the Amazonia to drill for oil."
Strange comment from a man who has grown wealthy by drilling for oil in Amazonia.
SHARE Wednesday, May 28, 2014 Madness Posing as Hyper-Rationality: OMB's Assault on Effective Regulation
Rather than leading the emergency, top priority effort to adopt the regulations to end the criminogenic environment in finance, OMB remains a leader of the effort to prevent effective regulation.
In a rational world the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), under Presidents Bush and Obama, would have responded to the financial crisis by demanding an emergency effort as a top national priority.
SHARE Friday, March 25, 2016 Democrats Need to Give Up Being Deficit Hawks Even When it Feels Good Politically
The leaders of both parties share the hypocrisy of bashing the rival party for supporting budgetary stimulus in circumstances in which stimulus is vital. Particular forms of budgetary stimulus can be simultaneously desirable (relative to austerity) and inferior relative to alternative forms of budgetary stimulus.