{"id":8219,"date":"2011-10-09T19:04:33","date_gmt":"2011-10-10T00:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=8219"},"modified":"2011-10-13T13:23:37","modified_gmt":"2011-10-13T18:23:37","slug":"william-black-why-nobody-went-to-jail-during-the-credit-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2011\/10\/09\/william-black-why-nobody-went-to-jail-during-the-credit-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"William Black: Why Nobody Went to Jail During the Credit Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Interview of William Black\" href=\"http:\/\/www.financialsense.com\/financial-sense-newshour\/guest-expert\/2011\/09\/14\/william-k-black-phd\/why-nobody-went-to-jail-during-the-credit-crisis\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>William Black: Why Nobody Went to Jail During the Credit Crisis<\/strong><\/a> is an interview with the man who wrote the book <a title=\"Previous Post\" href=\"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2010\/08\/20\/the-best-way-to-rob-a-bank-is-to-own-one\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 I also mention Black and his book in the post <a title=\"Previous post\" href=\"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2010\/09\/11\/the-best-way-to-rob-a-bank-is-to-own-a-politician\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own A Politician<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The link to the article that is the focus of this blog has both an audio of the interview and a transcript.\u00a0 To try to give you a sense of the magnitude of the fraud being discussed and to whet your appetite to read the article, I have selected some parts of the transcript to quote.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Remember I told you there were over a million cases of mortgage fraud a year and that overwhelmingly it\u2019s lenders who foot the fraud, the lie in the liars loan.<br \/>\n&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>To give you a comparison, at the peak of the Savings and Loan Crisis, there were 1,000 FBI agents working the cases.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nEight times more FBI agents than were working the cases in fiscal year 2007. And this crisis is forty times bigger and worse than the Savings and Loan Crisis. So you would have required massively more people. To give you another idea of scope, to investigate Enron, and Enron was complex, but it was nowhere near as big and as complex as Washington Mutual. It took 100 FBI agents. So you can see that with 120 nationwide, at most you could have done one major case.<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nEvery year, with a million plus cases of fraud a year, if you prosecute a thousand of them or two thousand of them or three thousand of them, you are a million cases further behind every year, right. It is just insane. So the FBI says we got to start going after the big guys at which point Bush\u2019s Attorney General Mukasey says no, he refuses to even create a National Task Force against mortgage fraud, saying famously, this is simply the equivalent of, and I am quoting again, \u201cWhite Collar Street Crime,\u201d little tiny stuff. Well of course he has assigned the FBI to only look at little cases and they report back, hey we\u2019re finding little cases. And the Mukasey interprets from that, hey only little cases exist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Is it any wonder that one of the signs I am going to hold up in the <a title=\"Occupy Boston Facebook page\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/OccupyBoston\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Occupy Boston<\/strong><\/a> march is <a title=\"Sign of protest\" href=\"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2011\/10\/08\/justice-for-wall-street\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Justice For Wall Street<\/strong><\/a>?\u00a0 <strong><a title=\"Previous post\" href=\"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2011\/10\/08\/sharon-the-two-fisted-protester\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" target=\"_blank\">Sharon The Two Fisted Protester<\/a><\/strong> is holding this sign plus another.<\/p>\n<p>For some reason, people cannot understand what the <em><strong>Occupy &#8230;<\/strong><\/em> movement really wants.\u00a0 They must have very short memories.<\/p>\n<p>I found the link to the William Black article on the Occupy Boston Facebook page, but I&#8217;ll be darned if I can figure out how to create a direct link to that specific post.\u00a0 If someone else makes a comment after I did, I may receive an email with the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>William Black: Why Nobody Went to Jail During the Credit Crisis is an interview with the man who wrote the book The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One.\u00a0 I also mention Black and his book in the post The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own A Politician. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8219","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=8219"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8323,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8219\/revisions\/8323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}