{"id":20035,"date":"2015-03-23T21:49:31","date_gmt":"2015-03-24T01:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=20035"},"modified":"2015-03-23T22:00:52","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T02:00:52","slug":"the-lessons-richard-bowens-fcic-testimony-should-have-taught-the-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2015\/03\/23\/the-lessons-richard-bowens-fcic-testimony-should-have-taught-the-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lessons Richard Bowen\u2019s FCIC Testimony Should Have Taught the Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"

William K. Black has written another astounding piece on the New Economic Perspectives<\/em> web site.\u00a0 The piece is titled The Lessons Richard Bowen\u2019s FCIC Testimony Should Have Taught the Nation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The financial crisis was driven by history\u2019s three most destructive epidemics of financial fraud:\u00a0 appraisal fraud, liar\u2019s loans, and the sale of fraudulently originated mortgages to the secondary market through fraudulent reps and warranties.\u00a0 One cannot understand, effectively investigate, or prosecute the senior financial officers who led these fraud epidemics without a detailed technical understanding of the fraud schemes and the financial markets. This first column is intended as a resource for those willing and able to make the investment towards achieving that understanding.\u00a0 Because people like me and Bowen no longer train FBI agents and prosecutors, and because the Obama administration\u2019s most senior officials have been unremittingly opposed to prosecuting the financial officers that led the three fraud epidemics, no FBI agent or prosecutor has the necessary technical understanding.\u00a0 My second column explains why this makes the FBI, the SEC, and the Department of Justice\u2019s (DOJ) failure to draw on Bowen\u2019s expertise all the more harmful and indefensible.<\/p>\n

No spoiler alert is required either about Holder\u2019s reaction to Bowen providing the Department of Justice (DOJ) with a criminal case against Citi\u2019s controlling officers on a platinum platter.\u00a0 Holder, as always, refused to prosecute the banksters whose frauds drove the financial crisis.\u00a0 He eventually brought a civil action to get some useless fines from Citi rather than from the Citi officers who looted Citi, Fannie and Freddie, and Treasury.\u00a0 Holder also failed to thank Bowen when Holder announced the civil settlement with Citigroup and refused to use the golden opportunity of the press conference announcing the settlement to ask other whistleblowers to come forward.\u00a0 All of this, of course, is SOP for Holder and Loretta Lynch, President Obama\u2019s choice to be his successor.\u00a0 Lynch failed to prosecute HSBC or its responsible officers for its extraordinary crimes on behalf of genocidal regimes, terrorism sanction busters, and massive money laundering for the Sinaloa drug cartel.\u00a0 You can only read it in right wing publications, but she is also accused of not speaking to either of the two key whistleblowers about HSBC.\u00a0 Lynch\u2019s nomination is being held hostage by the Republicans for all the wrong reasons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The piece is long, and I must admit I had to stop before the end and before I vomited.\u00a0 However, the piece is not that technical.\u00a0 I understood it fully and I am no accountant nor an economist.\u00a0 Why even a Nobel Prize winning economist could understand this article if they would only deign to read it.\u00a0 The trouble is that these prize winning economists make their theories about how an honest market would work, while having no appreciation that massive fraud is actually how many markets work.\u00a0 It never occurs to them to listen to the law enforcement people who understand fraud when they see it.\u00a0 They also don’t listen to banks’ own experienced bank enforcement executives who shout out about the fraud, and are summarily crushed by their fraudulent bosses.<\/p>\n

I included in my excerpt the paragraph that mentions Loretta Lynch so that I can refer back to it anytime I need to explain why I am dead set against her nomination for Attorney General.<\/p>\n

You’ll have to read at least enough of the article to understand why I categorized this article under Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior<\/a>. You won’t have to read much to be hit over the head by the figurative 2 by 4 of the reasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William K. Black has written another astounding piece on the New Economic Perspectives web site.\u00a0 The piece is titled The Lessons Richard Bowen\u2019s FCIC Testimony Should Have Taught the Nation. The financial crisis was driven by history\u2019s three most destructive epidemics of financial fraud:\u00a0 appraisal fraud, liar\u2019s loans, and the sale of fraudulently originated mortgages […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20035","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-greenbergs-law-of-counterproductive-behavior","7":"category-stevegsposts","8":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20035"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20038,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20035\/revisions\/20038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}