If only every American could watch these interviews and understand what is said here, millions would take to the streets when Obama and the Congress get set pass the "Grand Bargain," which is truly the "Grand Betrayal" -- aka legislative theft of American's social safety net. Bill Black is one of the top economists in the country and also a white-colar criminologist who sent over a thousand savings-and-loan CEOs to jail in the early 1990's for kind of financial crimes now committed with impunity by today's "too-big-to-fail" banks, whose CEOs have been rewarded, rather than jailed for their mega-crimes, protected by the likes of Tim Geithner and Jack Lew. Matt Taibbi is an investigative reporter who has been exposing in Rolling Stone magazine the criminality of the big banks and the government that coddles them.

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 2013                                                                               Original Here 

"Failure of Epic Proportions": Treasury Nominee Jack Lew’s Pro-Bank, Austerity, Deregulation Legacy



Former bank regulator William Black and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi join us to dissect the career of Jack Lew, President Obama’s pick to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy Geither. Currently Obama’s chief of staff, Lew was an executive at Citigroup from 2006 to 2008 at the time of the financial crisis. He backed financial deregulation efforts while he headed the Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton. During that time, Clinton enacted two key laws to deregulate Wall Street: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Black, a white-collar criminologist and former senior financial regulator, is the author of "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." A contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, Taibbi is the author of "Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History." [Original includes rush transcript]


FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 2013                                                                               Original Here 

Matt Taibbi & William Black on Bailout Secrets & How New Foreclosure Deal Spares Banks from Justice



Four years after the massive bailout that rescued Wall Street, we look at the state of the financial sector with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and former financial regulator William Black. In a new article for Rolling Stone, Taibbi argues the government did not just bail out Wall Street, but also lied on the financial sector’s behalf, calling unhealthy banks healthy and helping banks cover up how much aid they were getting. The government’s approach to the banks came under new scrutiny this week after it reached an $8.5 billion settlement for improprieties in the wrongful foreclosures on millions of American homeowners, including flawed paperwork, robo-signing and wrongly modified loans. The settlement will end an independent review of all foreclosures, meaning the banks could be avoiding billions of dollars in further penalties, in addition to criminal prosecution. [Original includes rush transcript] 

Economist and top federal prosecutor during the S&L crisis, William Black, declares Goldman Sachs "rotten to the core"

"Rotten to the Core": Bill Black and Barry Ritholtz React to Goldman Fraud Charges

Posted on Yahoo Finance Tech-Ticker April 16, 2010 by Aaron Task

The SEC's civil suit against Goldman Sachs rocked the market Friday and has potentially major ramifications for the firm as well as the debate in Washington D.C. regarding financial re-regulation.

In the accompanying video, I discuss the news with Barry Ritholtz, CEO of FusionIQ and author of Bailout Nation, and William Black, a top federal prosecutor during the S&L crisis and associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Ritholtz and Black agree there is strong evidence of wrongdoing and that it's unlikely this was an isolated incident. Wall Street is "rotten to the core," Black says. "When [Goldman CEO Lloyd] Blankfein said ‘Goldman's doing God's work,' we didn't know that ‘doing God's work' involved blowing up your own customers."

The SEC charged Goldman with misleading its customers by withholding "vital information" about a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO) named Abacus that was intentionally stuffed with the most toxic subprime mortgage-backed securities.

Wall Street is a "sharp-elbowed, bloodthirsty place to work" but "this makes the 'Vampire Squid' nomer look soft and cuddly," Ritholtz quips. "There's been rampant fraud on Wall Street -- all kinds of bad behavior that's gone unpunished."

Goldman vowed to fight the charges, which the firms says are "completely unfounded in law and fact," The New York Times reports.

The suit also names Goldman V.P. Fabrice Tourre who helped create and sell the investment vehicle. "This was deliberate, corporate policy," not the work of a rogue employee, Black says.

Famed hedge fund manager John Paulson, who helped structure the Abacus deal and then shorted it, was not cited in the SEC suit. But it's like "the guy who owns the hurricane insurance on house is helping use crappier lumber to build it. So he made it pretty wobbly and then he bet against it," Ritholtz says.

Adds Ritholtz on Paulson: "He did something that's kind of sleazy. But I don’t see it as technically illegal. He let Goldman do all the illegal stuff.”

That's probably true, Black says, but Paulson “should have seen the disclosures. So if he sees disclosure statements by Goldman Sachs that he knows to be false, and that he’s going to profit from, he has a serious danger of being viewed as a co-conspirator. Now the SEC hasn’t chosen to go that way. The only individual named is small fry. That’s the major question here. Why is the SEC aiming so low in terms of individuals?”

Stay tuned for continuing coverage of this scandal.

Full disclosure: I edited Ritholtz's book and was paid for my contributions.