Cherchez la Verite: European banks

Showing posts with label European banks. Show all posts

Thursday, September 06, 2012

A FEW YEARS BACK EUROPEAN BANKS WON A COMPETITION IN REGULATORY LAXITY WITH THE UNITED STATES, RESULTING IN THEIR HAVING ROUGHLY TWICE AS MUCH DEBT COMPARED TO EQUITY AS THE U.S. BANKS. CONSEQUENTLY ESSENTIALLY ALL THE BIG BANKS IN EUROPE FAILED AND HAD TO BE BAILED OUT BY THE PEOPLE OF EUROPE. IF THERE HAD BEEN REGULATORS REGULATING, THE CRISIS COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED. BUT THE CRISIS IS NOT OVER YET ...AND UK CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE THE SOLUTION TO BE LESS REGULATION. HOWEVER, "WITHOUT REGULATORY COPS ON THE BEAT, CHEATERS PROSPER." -- BILL BLACK

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September 6, 2012

Race to the Regulatory Bottom: Bill Black

Wall St. wants to compete with London for lack of financial regulation
Watch full multipart The Black Financial and Fraud Report:

Bio

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri -- Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" -- frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

Friday, December 02, 2011

December 02, 2011

Richard Wolff: Eurozone Woes Result from Mating of Our "Dysfunctional" Political, Economic Systems

European leaders are preparing to unveil their plans for addressing the sovereign debt crisis that’s threatened to tear apart the eurozone. Both France and Germany are expected to push for changes to the eurozone treaty, including centralized oversight of national budgets and tighter reins on debt. In a speech on Thursday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said radical changes are needed in order to save the euro. Sarkozy’s address came after central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, took coordinated action to prevent a credit crunch among European banks. For more on the developing crisis in Europe and its implications worldwide, we are joined by economist and professor Richard Wolff. He is the author of several books, including "Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It." "The Fed is recognizing that another bailout is needed," Wolff says. "All the steps taken over the last few years to try to cope with this crisis of our capitalist system haven’t worked, and so we’re now again on the brink of a crisis, and again public money and public institutions are bailing out a private banking system and a private enterprise system that is not working and is not solving its own problems." Wolff continues, "The fundamental question is, you’ve got to deal with an economic system that isn’t working... You’ve got to take big steps that change the way this economic system works, or find a new system... It’s as though we have a dysfunctional economic system coupled to a now dysfunctional political system, and instead of fixing each other, these two systems are making each other in a kind of a spiral downturn." [original here]

Guest:

Richard D. Wolff, Emeritus Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and visiting professor at New School University. He is the author of several books, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.