Below is a link to an interview between Bill Moyers and William K. Black (from last Friday) on the financial meltdown. He details out some of the frauds that were so huge, they ... disappeared from public scrutiny of any sort. It's pretty stunning stuff. Basically, so far, we have only scratched the surface:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04232010/watch.html
``BILL MOYERS: The regulators were not fully engaged. I mean, this is an old story. We all know about regulatory capture where the regulated take control of the regulators.
WILLIAM K. BLACK Yeah, but this one is far worse. That's not very candid testimony [Geithner, Bernanke, et. al] on anybody's part there. The Fed had unique authority. And it had it since 1994 to regulate every single mortgage lender in America. And you might think the Fed would use that authority.
And you might especially think that, if you knew that Gramlich, one of the Fed members, went personally to Alan Greenspan and said, there's a housing bubble. And there's a terrible crisis in non-prime. We need to send the examiners in. We need to use our regulatory authority. And Greenspan refused. Lehman was brought down primarily by selling liar's loans. It was the biggest seller of liar's loans in the world.
And when we look at these liar's loans, we find 90 percent fraud. 90 percent. And we find that most of the frauds are not induced by the borrower, but they're overwhelmingly done by the loan brokers...''
It goes on and on for about a half hour and paints a picture of the financial sector as a giant fraud sector. Toward the end, Black goes after neo-classical economics and calls business schools, fraud training factories. He says, according their economic ideology fraud can't exist, because the markets automatically clean themselves...so corporations don't need laws or prosecutors, or even rules. He calls this a criminogenic culture from the schools to the corps to the political and regulatory enablers.
Here is Black's opening remarks in the 04/21/2010 congressional testimony:
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/04/william-k-blacks-testimony-to-congress.html
And an hour long talk that explains the theory of fraud through control accounting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJTcAO-BnTs&feature=related
After googling his name, I see he has been on this trip for a couple years. Nobody seems to be listening.
CG