Video - Bill Black on the Real News Network - Recorded Feb. 1, 2011
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By Dr. Pitchfork
Great interview with Professor William K. Black. He gives the Commission credit for pointing out that the crisis was avoidable, but says the commission was rigged, by design, to fail, noting in particular the determination to have the commission be explicitly "bi-partisan." Of course, "bi-partisan" in these circumstances means "bank party," with Dems blaming "deregulation" and Republicans denying it. The upshot of this is that the squabble over regulation takes the focus off the banks themselves and crimes they may have committed.
In this vein, Black also blasts the Commission for not calling fraud and crime by their real names, calling them instead "dramatic failures of corporate governance and risk management." You know, it was all just a big accident and some people got a little carried away, and some people made loads of money at taxpayer expense, but nobody did anything indictable. Black says this characterization is a "deliberate obfuscation of the facts," pointing out, as we all know, that the system was just rife with fraud, from liar loans to accounting gimmicks to CDO's purposely constructed to pay off for Goldman Sachs and hedge fund managers like John Paulson.
Eric Holder also takes a beating here and Black talks about the "appraiser black lists" held by some of the banks, like Washington Mutual. An appraiser got put on the black list, not for being incompetent, but for being honest -- for refusing to inflate a valuation. Black notes the failure to "put the heat" on AG Eric Holder, both from the Commission itself and from journalists. The subtext here is that Eric Holder isn't going to do jack squat unless he has the heat put on him.
On the surface, it may be mystifying why Bill Black wasn't asked to be a part of the Commission or some other investigative body related to the financial crisis. But then again, it should be obvious why Bill Black was never asked to be a part of the Commission or any other investigative body. And that's the problem.
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