Updated: Scroll down for VIDEO - Bill Black with Max Keiser.
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This is a beauty. Are you listening Sheila Bair.
Bill Black says that the FASB 157 Hour Of Power, and delusion, is over. Banks are still insolvent. The Fed is complicit. Put the banks with the most fraud into government receivership, sack management teams, investigate, find the hidden balance sheet secrets, then prosecute.
- "Foreclosure fraud is the only thing standing between banks and Armageddon. The financial media treats Bank of America as if it were a legitimate bank rather than a "vector" spreading the mortgage fraud epidemic throughout much of the Western world."
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By William K. Black
Foreclose on the Fraudsters, Part 1: Put Bank of America in Receivership
The lenders, officers, and professional that directed, participated in, and profited from the fraudulent loans and securities should be prevented from causing further damage to the victims of their frauds, through fraudulent foreclosures.
The banks that are foreclosing on fraudulently originated mortgages frequently cannot produce legitimate documents... Now, only fraud will let them take the homes. Many of the required documents do not exist, and those that do exist would provide proof of the fraud that was involved in loan origination, securitization, and marketing. This in turn would allow investors to force the banks to buy-back the fraudulent securities. In other words, to keep the investors at bay the foreclosing banks must manufacture fake documents.... Foreclosure fraud is the only thing standing between the banks and Armageddon.
- The fraudulent CEOs looted with impunity, were left in power, and were granted their fondest wish when Congress, at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce, Chairman Bernanke, and the bankers' trade associations, successfully extorted the professional Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to turn the accounting rules into a farce.
- The FASB's new rules allowed the banks (and the Fed, which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic mortgages as wholly inadequate collateral) to refuse to recognize hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. This accounting scam produces enormous fictional "income" and "capital" at the banks. The fictional income produces real bonuses to the CEOs that make them even wealthier. The fictional bank capital allows the regulators to evade their statutory duties under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law to close the insolvent and failing banks.
- The inflated asset values allow the Fed and the administration to ignore the Fed's massive loss exposure and allow Treasury to spread propaganda claiming that TARP resolved all the problems -- at virtually no cost.
Donovan claims that we have held the elite frauds accountable -- but we have done the opposite. We have made the CEOs of the largest financial firms -- typically already among the 500 wealthiest Americans -- even wealthier. We have rewarded fraud, incompetence, and venality by our most powerful elites.
If the government does not hold the fraudulent CEOs responsible, who is supposed to stop the epidemic of elite financial fraud? Obama's answer is the fraudulent CEOs themselves, at a time of their choosing. You can't make this stuff up.
Bank of America chose to purchase Countrywide at a point when it -- and its senior leaders -- were infamous. Bank of America made some of these Countrywide leaders its senior leaders. Yet, Bank of America is not treated as a criminal entity. President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Donovan, and Barr cannot even bring themselves to use the "f" word -- fraud. They substitute euphemisms designed to trivialize elite criminality. The administration officials do not call for Bank of America to be the subject of a criminal investigation. They do not demand that Fannie, Freddie, Ambac, the FHFA, and Pimco file criminal referrals about Countrywide's frauds. They do not demand that Fannie, Freddie, and the Fed refuse to purchase or take as collateral any mortgage instrument from Bank of America. No one at the Harvard Club in New York moves to kick Bank of America's officers out of their club! The financial media treats Bank of America as if it were a legitimate bank rather than a "vector" spreading the mortgage fraud epidemic throughout much of the Western world.
Appointing a receiver for an SDI will be a major undertaking for the FDIC, but it is also well within its capabilities. Contrary to the scare mongering about "nationalizing" banks, receivers are used to returning failed banks to private ownership. Receiverships are managed by experienced bankers with records of competence and integrity rather than the dread "bureaucrats." We appointed roughly a thousand receivers during the S&L and banking crises of the 1980s and early 1990s under Presidents Reagan and Bush.
Here is how it works. A receiver is appointed on Friday. The bank opens for business as normal (from the bank's customers' perspective) on Monday. The checks clear, the ATMs work, and the branches all open. The receiver's managers direct the business operations, find the true facts about the bank's operations, senior managers, and financial condition, recognize the real losses, and make the appropriate referrals to the FBI and the SEC so that the frauds can be investigated and prosecuted.
The receiver is also a well-proven device for splitting up banks that are too large and incoherent by selling units of the business to different bidders who most value the operations.
Earlier today:
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Video: William K. Black with Max Keiser -- Aired Sep. 12, 2010
Excellent interview.
Bill Black helped send more than 1,000 criminal bankers to jail in the 80's for their part in the $150 billion S&L crisis. This time around, exactly ZERO fraudsters have been sent to the hooskow in a $6 trillion intergalactic banking blowout.
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