If you are still interested in understanding the current financial mess I recommend that you view a recent segment of Bill Moyer’s Journal. It’s a half-hour long, but it is a fascinating thirty minutes. His guest is William Black (left), now an economics professor, he was a senior litigator during the savings and loan crisis in the ‘80s. He has just written a book called, "The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One."He pulls no punches, calling the current situation a fraud that was organized, planned and executed from the top of a number of major financial institutions, and with the aid and support of legislators and regulators. He points fingers directly at Larry Summers, Bob Rubin, Phil Graham, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and a number of other well known people -- including George Bush, who transferred 500 FBI agents out of the financial fraud investigations unit after 9/11, and never replaced them. The net result is that today we have 1/5 as many FBI agents working this beat, while the AIG bleeding alone is greater than the entire S&L debacle.
And while he worked to elected Barack Obama, he has some sharp criticism for the way he is dealing with the problem now that he is in office.
Even if you don’t believe, as I do, that many financial executives and Congressmen are criminals, you may find Black persuasive when describing how intellectually dishonest we are in our attempts to even understand the problem. His comparison of the financial mess with the way we analyze aircraft accidents is very apt.
This is well worth your time.
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