Norman Solomon — Clinton’s Transition Team: a Corporate Presidency Foretold

“The transition team is one of the absolute most important things in the world for a new administration,” says William K. Black, who has held key positions at several major regulatory agencies such as the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Along with “deciding what are we actually going to make our policy priorities,” the transition team will handle key questions: “Who will the top people be? Who are we going to vet, to hold all of the cabinet positions, and many non-cabinet positions, as well? The whole staffing of the senior leadership of the White House.”

Black’s assessment of Salazar, Podesta and the transition team’s four co-chairs is withering. “These aren’t just DNC regulars, Democratic National Committee regulars,” he said in an interview with The Real News Network. “What you’re seeing is complete domination by what used to be the Democratic Leadership Council. So this was a group we talked about in the past. Very, very, very right-wing on foreign policy, what they called a muscular foreign policy, which was a euphemism for invading places. And very, very tough on crime — this was that era of mass incarceration that Bill Clinton pushed, and it’s when Hillary was talking about black ‘superpredators,’ this myth, this so dangerous myth.”

Black added: “And on the economic side, they were all in favor of austerity. All in favor of privatization. Tried to do a deal with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security. And of course, were all in favor of things like NAFTA.”

As for Hillary Clinton’s widely heralded “move to the left” in recent months, Black said that it “was purely calculated for political purposes. And all of the team that’s going to hire all the key people and vet the key people for the most senior positions for at least the first several years of what increasingly looks likely to be a Clinton administration are going to be picked by these people, who are the opposite of progressive.”

Counterpunch
Clinton’s Transition Team: a Corporate Presidency Foretold
Norman Solomon

Yves Smith — Bill Black and Stephanie Kelton: Is it Time for a New Deal Federal Jobs Program?

Video and transcript.

Naked Capitalism
Bill Black and Stephanie Kelton: Is it Time for a New Deal Federal Jobs Program?
Yves Smith

Clinton Vs. Sanders on Big Banks at Real News Network

Bill Black, adviser to Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton supporter Paul Hodes appear on The Real News and discuss whether the Dodd-Frank legislation is effective at preventing systemic risk from Wall Street monopolies. You can view the video below or on The Real News‘ site with a transcript.

New Economic Perspectives
Clinton Vs. Sanders on Big Banks
Devin Smith

Reno Berkeley — Banking Expert Who Exposed Savings & Loan Corruption Joins Sanders Campaign

An expert in banking corruption and finance has joined the Bernie Sanders campaign. William K. Black, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-KC, is Bernie Sanders’ new economic advisor. Black was one of the central figures in exposing and prosecuting corruption in the savings and loan crisis from the late 1980s and mid-1990s. His addition to the Sanders campaign brings important knowledge in laws pertaining to finance and banking.…

Inquisitr.com

Banking Expert Who Exposed Savings & Loan Corruption Joins Sanders Campaign

Reno Berkeley

William K. Black — Announcing the Bank Whistleblowers United Initial Initiatives

I am writing to announce the formation of a new pro bono group and a policy initiative that we hope many of our readers will support and help publicize. Gary Aguirre, Bill Black, Richard Bowen, and Michael Winston are the founding members of the Bank Whistleblowers United. We are all from the general field of finance and we are all whistleblowers who are unemployable in finance and financial regulation because we spoke truth to power and committed the one unforgivable sin in finance and in Washington, D.C. – being repeatedly proved correct when the powerful are repeatedly proved wrong.… 

New Economic Perspectives
Announcing the Bank Whistleblowers United Initial Initiatives

An Explanation of the Bank Whistleblowers United 60-Day Plan
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Warren Investigation Finds Taxpayers Could Be on the Hook for $10 Trillion in Risky Derivatives — Jessica Desvarieux interviews Bill Black

Video and transcript.

Real News Network
Warren Investigation Finds Taxpayers Could Be on the Hook for $10 Trillion in Risky Derivatives
Jessica Desvarieux interviews Bill Black

Supposedly left leaning NY Times suggests that Europe should "make an example" out of Greece. Bill Black eviscerates.

Funny...Conservatives often criticize the NY Times as being a "left leaning" news organization. You wouldn't know that from some of the economic articles that they post.

Here's a recent article where the Times appears to suggest that Europe (do they mean, the Troika?) "make an example" out of Greece, as if the Greek people haven't already been made an example of.

And Bill Black, in his inimitable way, totally eviscerates the Times.

Here's Black:

"It is often the moral and economic blindness of New York Times articles about the EU crisis that is most striking. The newest entry in this field is entitled “Now Europe Must Decide Whether to Make an Example of Greece.” That is a chilling phrase most associated in our popular culture with a Consigliere and his Don deciding whether to order a mob “hit.” It is, therefore, fitting (albeit over the top) as a criticism of the troika’s economic, political, and propaganda war against the Greek people. Except that the article is actually another salvo in that war." Read more.

The NY Times is another example of how the supposed "left" or, the "liberals," are left-leaning in name only. Their hypocrisy on nearly all matters economic leave an opening so big that Conservatives can drive a truck through it and they do, every single, time.

There are no true liberals or progressives anymore. It's an empty term. That being said, no one should be surprised by the lack of progress for interests of the broader citizenry.

Greece: On Behalf of Europe … Jessica Desvarieux interviews Michael Hudson and Bill Black

Video and transcript

Michael Hudson
Greece: On Behalf of Europe …

Jessica Desvarieux interviews Michael Hudson and Bill Black

Richard Bowen — William Black Tells the Ugly Truth!

Richard Bowen is a Citi whistleblower regarding whom Bill Black has published several recent blog posts at New Economics Perspectives.

Richard Bowen
William Black Tells the Ugly Truth!

crossposted at New Economics Perspectives

William K. Black — EU Deflation Arrives and the Troika Continues to Fiddle While the EU Burns

Good post by Bill Black on EZ deflation in which is excoriates the usual. I would just add that price level is not an observable but rather an estimate, and estimating is a slippery affair. Central banks try to err on the high side rather than fall into the deflation trap. When a currency zone officially falls into deflation, the government has drastically missed the mark and failed to use its available tools properly. As Bill notes, deflation doesn't just happen. It happens over time through a period of disinflation. This has been obvious in the EZ, especially through its effects on the periphery. Moreover, sanctions on Russia have further reduced demand for European produced goods and services, which is a double whammy on top of ill-advsed austerity. This is dangerous not only socio-economically, but also politically. Instability is increasing.

New Economic Perspectives
EU Deflation Arrives and the Troika Continues to Fiddle While the EU Burns
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Ellen Brown — EU Showdown: Greece Takes on the Vampire Squid

Greece can regain its sovereignty by defaulting on its debt, abandoning the ECB and the euro, and issuing its own national currency (the drachma) through its own central bank. But that would destabilize the eurozone and might end in its breakup. 

Will the troika take that risk? 2015 is shaping up to be an interesting year.

Good post by Ellen, but the conclusion above is unrealistic at this point if the opposition wins the election. The Greek people overwhelmingly want to stay in the EZ, so there is as yet no popular support for withdrawing. The question is how the opposition can pressure the troika to relax austerity without raising that sledgehammer.

Web of Debt
EU Showdown: Greece Takes on the Vampire Squid
Ellen Brown

Bill Black — Jeffrey Sachs Channeled His Inner Bill Black – and Obama and Holder Ignored Him Too

Jeffrey Sachs is finally redeeming himself from the destruction wrought by "the Harvard boys"on the post-USSR emerging economies, especially Russia, which turned Russia into a neoliberal Mafia-style state. Now he is waking up to the criminogenic environment called Wall Street and call them on it.

New Economic Perspectives
Jeffrey Sachs Channeled His Inner Bill Black – and Obama and Holder Ignored Him TooWilliam K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Ecuador to Adopt Digital Currency — Jessica Desvarieux interviews Bill Black

Video and transcript.

The Real News
Ecuador to Adopt Digital CurrencyJessica Desvarieux interviews Bill Black

Bill Black — Gary Becker’s Nobel Prize for Getting It all Wrong: The Family

George Stigler celebrated Gary Becker as theoclassical economics’ schwerpunkt that led their blitzkrieg assault on other social sciences. Stigler proudly called economics the “Imperial” discipline. The idea that imperialism was a desirable trait is a typical example of Stigler’s blindness to history and human suffering. Stigler famously proclaimed that economics alone was actually a social “science” because only it had a theory of human motivation (maximizing self-interest)....

In this five part series I discuss these four areas and Becker’s role with regard to financial crises. Stigler was incorrect about other social sciences lacking a theory of human motivation or ignoring rationality and incentives. The series will become part of the book that I am co-authoring with Wesley Marshall on economists and economics that studies the manifold failures of recipients of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize. Theoclassical economics’ reductionist dogma of human motivation is one of its great weaknesses of these Prize winners. One of the ironies that I will develop in this series of articles about Becker’s embarrassing forays into other disciplines is that he abandons the dogma that all behavior is self-interested in his work on the family, uses the dogma in the fields of crime and addiction where it makes particularly poor sense and produces a series of errors, and inadvertently demonstrates the circularity of the dogma in his work on discrimination and on “rational addiction.”

New Economic Perspectives
Gary Becker’s Nobel Prize for Getting It all Wrong: The Family
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Theoclassical economics can simultaneously shrink the “pie” and in the infamous words of Citicorp’s ode to “plutonomy”:

“In a plutonomy there … are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the ‘non-rich’, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.”

Becker never evinced the slightest understanding of how discrimination systematically denies its victims the ability to make “the most of life.”

Bill does an excellent job of showing how Becker was both an intellectual fool and an ideological tool, not to mention being emotionally impoverished and morally deviant*. So much for his "rationality." And as Bill adds, "I need to emphasize that I am not making any of this up." Summary, "All of this is incoherent and bizarre."

On the Nobel Sveriges Riksbank Prize: "Economics is the only discipline in which one can achieve top honors for being proven disastrously wrong and having relied on obvious logical and theoretical flaws and abundant evidence."

*Confounding morality with efficiency is deviant. It is tantamount to claiming that morality is amorality. But such is the logic of maximizing self-interest "rationally."
 

John Hull — Lean and Mean: How obsessive cost-cutting destroyed job security

The message is proliferating:

“I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left.” (Liam Byrne)

For there to be austerity, there must be no money. But for a state with its own central bank and its own sovereign currency to have no money, there must be a complete misunderstanding – or misrepresentation – of what money is and how it is created.

The definitive reference point for this fiction – the last two words used unreflectively by lobbyists, journalists, and politicians – is Margaret Thatcher’s declaration: “There is no such thing as public money. There is only taxpayers’ money.” In Thatcher’s macro-economic model, individuals first earn money from which the state then borrows or takes through taxation to provide public spending. This image of the scrounger filching your earnings and leeching from your savings to spend on what it cannot afford was brilliantly constructed to justify and enable the shrinking of the state. Governments since Thatcher have thus cast themselves in the role of Prudence: guardians of the taxpayers’ money, determined to cut taxes and cut spending.

Beneficiaries of state expenditure such as civil servants, public employees, and recipients of social security have been cast by implication as scroungers; and public roles (in government, health, education, welfare, environment, transport) recast as costs, and never investment. In contrast private sector providers in receipt of state subsidies have been cast as “wealth creators”, and those providing what were previously public services as fellow guardians of “taxpayers’ money”, creating “real” jobs while cutting costs to “the taxpayer”. In the words of Chancellor George Osborne,

“[Our policy is] an economy where the state does not take almost half of all our national income, crowding out private endeavour.”

With the state reduced to a system for taking from the earner and giving to the non-productive, recipients of social security can be transformed into victims of the state, dependent on other individuals’ money: and the moral imperative becomes saving them by removing the state and their benefits, and forcing them into paid labour. Taxation is itself reduced to the immoral act of seizing one person’s property to subsidize another’s dependency, and a moral justification for tax avoidance or evasion – or even ending taxation – constructed....


The first institutional logic of a neoliberal state is to re-regulate to promote “the market” as the optimal device for organizing human activities....


As the neoliberal state continues on its mission to cut government spending, it has entered into a positive feedback loop with business on a mission to cut costs. The neoliberal state deregulates and cut taxes, and fails to collect taxes: all of which cut the costs of doing business. The neoliberal state ceases supervision of business, while increasing supervision of being poor or ordinary: all of which cut the costs of doing business. The neoliberal state reassigns its penal apparatus to imprison the poor, but leave the white collar criminal untouched: all which liberates business. The neoliberal state can privatize public services, creating almost unlimited opportunity for rentiers.

Together, the neoliberal state, its finance sector, and its corporations progress through what Professor William Black calls the “three Ds”: deregulation, de-supervision, and de-facto decriminalization....

Misinformed or mendacious, in a world dominated by what Black calls, theoclassical economics, the Thatcher narrative of “taxpayers’ money” is canonical. It’s also a complete fiction, as a recent article issued by the Bank of England about the role of money shows. (Almost all) money is created out of nothing by commercial banks creating loans. A central bank with a sovereign currency can create money (as the Bank of England had to do when commercial banks stopped lending in the most recent financial crash). It is why the Bank of England was created over 300 years ago. As Borges writes, “A fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty – not even that it is false.”

The truth is difficult to find, as the dominant and pervasive theoclassical economics neglects money and the monetary system, preferring to treat money as neutral ether in which economic transactions are done. But the truth is startling and important:

“Money and monetary systems… are social constructs, and can and must be managed, mobilised and deployed to serve the wider interests of society and the ecosystem … We know it can be done, because in our recent history, after the 1929 financial crash, society succeeded in wrenching control of the monetary system back from a reckless and greedy wealthy elite.”

Under the onslaught of neoliberalism it is necessary to identify a prerequisite, a necessary response, to stem that onslaught and initiate its retreat. That prerequisite is the understanding that money and monetary systems are constructed by society. The response is to restore money and monetary systems into society’s democratic control. From there, regulation and supervision of finance and markets can be re-imposed. Social value, dignity, and security can then be restored to employment.

DiscoverSociety
Lean and Mean: How obsessive cost-cutting destroyed job security
John Hully | IT Service Manager with a special interest in Governance
(h/t Andy Blatchford)

Debate on heterodoxy going on in Wren-Lewis's comments

James K. Galbraith and William K. Black have posted along with some others. Maybe the start of something?

mainly macro
Looking for the flimflam
Simon Wren-Lewis | Professor of Economics, Oxford University
(h/t Lars Syll)

Thomas Frank — There is no meritocracy: It’s just the 1 percent, and the game is rigged

The game is rigged: We elected Obama to hold the 1 percent accountable. So why are they still running everything?

Salon
There is no meritocracy: It’s just the 1 percent, and the game is rigged
Thomas Frank

Blistering indictment of President Obama, who ran to address inequality and immediately switched to opportunity, as the poster boy of "meritocracy" run by and for the Establishment.

The conclusion is pretty much that the ballot box isn't working anymore, and that candidates will say one thing to get elected and then immediately switch into campaign fundraising mode for the next election by soliciting from the large donors from whom most contributions come.

Interesting shout out to Bill Black, too:

It is even more infuriating to realize that the correct answers to the test have been available to Professor Obama all along. Back in September of 2008, when the financial crisis was gathering speed, I was writing a column for the Wall Street Journal; in my efforts to comprehend the disaster, I learned that the nation’s foremost authority on the type of fraud that had wrecked the economy was a former S&L regulator named Bill Black. I went on to ask Bill Black’s opinion probably dozens of times; as the years passed and the crisis deepened, Bill Black went on to be quoted by just about everyone and to become probably the most famous former S&L regulator in the world. His doctrine of “control fraud” is today familiar to anyone trying to understand what went wrong in 2008.

Another group that sought out my friend Bill Black during the crisis year was the Obama campaign. For them he narrated a twelve-minute campaign video, describing at length the involvement of Republican candidate John McCain in the Keating Five scandal, and faulting McCain for choosing a zealous deregulator as his chief economic adviser—“he’s picked the worst possible source of advice.” (You can watch the video here.)

When Obama won the presidency, I assumed that Bill Black would soon be moving to Washington to usher prominent bankers through their perp walks. That’s what opportunity and meritocracy meant, after all. You bring in the guy who understands the problem.
Of course it never happened. His phone never rang. There was no ladder of opportunity for him or anyone like him, precisely because they represented accountability. And Barack Obama, champion of meritocracy, went on instead to pick the second-worst-possible source of advice.

When I ask Bill Black now what these last few years tell us about fairness and meritocracy, he refers me to Gresham’s law. “If you gain a competitive advantage by cheating,” he says, “then you won’t get a meritocracy, you’ll get a system where cheaters prosper and bad ethics drive good ethics out of the market.” Is that what kept him out of Washington, I ask? Yes, in part. It’s “the international race to the bottom, which the administration has largely adopted. ‘We can’t crack down [on the banks, the administration thinks,] they’ll all move to the City of London. We need to have the JOBS bill,’ a godsend to fraudsters, ‘because too many IPOs are being done in China instead of the United States.’ ”

“People like me were moved out long ago,” Black concludes. To a government “trying to signal continuity and friendliness to the banks,” his presence would have been, he supposes, more than a little discordant.

Randy — Yes, Paul, Banks Do Create Money; and Bill does TED!

Links with Randy's comments.

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Yes, Paul, Banks Do Create Money; and Bill does TED!

L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, University of Missouri at Kansas City

“The finest schools in America produced a criminal elite that stole the store in less than a decade."

Commentary by Roger Erickson

No, that wasn't written by Bill Black.

Rather, it's the final output from recently demised Alexander Cockburn - and, incidentally, highly recommended (personally) by a pre-eminent chronicler of the MICC and Pentagon corruption.

A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture

Is that what "No Child Left Behind" was really all about? Creating a Gresham's dynamic, where the Keating-5 could be free to become the Cheating-450, and then the Keeping-1%?

"Everyone's doing it!" The new motto for the GOP AND DNP alike.

Even a return to Glass-Steagall wouldn't be enough. We need to set our sights high enough to survive a context ol' Mr. Glass couldn't have imagined the extent of. We need a Black-Cockburn Act, to once again impose minimal separation of graft and state.

ps: How long will it take us to recover the storehouse of Middle Class resiliency ... if we can do it at all?

Randy Wray — Setting the Record Straight: BofA's Rebecca Mairone Found Liable for Fraud

Now here's poetic justice. Back in the fall of 2010, Bill Black and I wrote a two part essay for the Huffington Post calling on Washington to go after the foreclosure fraudsters. Specifically, we pointed our fingers at the serial fraudsters at Bank of America. See here, and here.

We argued it is time to put Bank of America in receivership....

Predictably, we got the usual attacks by trolls. Whenever you write a piece that argues that the biggest banks need to be held accountable for their frauds, they roll out the trolls. Usually, the trolls will not sign their defense of fraud with their real names.
However, that time, BofA tasked Rebecca Mairone, Default Servicing Executive of Bank of America Home Loans, with writing an article to counter our piece. You can read her piece here.

In it she proposes to Set the Record Straight on Bank of America foreclosures. Instead, she offers nothing but obfuscation...

Irony of irony. Guess what, folks. Mairone is now a outed fraudster. Read here.
She and her bank have been found guilty of the types of activities that we had outlined.

The Huffington Post
Setting the Record Straight: BofA's Rebecca Mairone Found Liable for Fraud
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics and Research Director of the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, University of Missouri–Kansas City

It is not a surprise to us that the fraud was found. Fraud is everywhere at the biggest banks. Their business model was, and remains, fraud. Fraud can be found everywhere you look. All you have to do is look. Up to now, Washington has turned a blind eye to fraud at the nation's biggest fraudsters. While it is nice that they are finally going after some of the small fry fraudsters, like Mairone, it is time to go after the top fraudsters -- those who oversaw and rewarded (and were rewarded for) fraud....

It doesn't have to be this way. Stop the fraudsters. Stop the foreclosures. There should be an immediate 5 year Country-wide moratorium on foreclosures. Investigate the fraud. Jail the fraudsters. Put the biggest banks into receivership. Begin to clean-up the document mess created by the banks and MERS (the banks lost or destroyed all the records of property ownership). Our economy will not recover until this is done. [emphasis added]