New William Black Piece in Barron's Is Not Bullish

Update: For a contrary, quasi-bullish view (and not reassuring for those who shorted the Dow), see Simon Johnson: TNRtv: Signs of an Economic Recovery?

If Robert Shiller's piece in Bloomberg were not sufficiently amusing, check out William Black's interview with Jack Willoughby in Barron's.

I wonder if Rep Paul Ryan reads a copy of the interview at the great GOP Tea Party today.

An excerpt:

Black: Mopping up the savings-and-loan crisis cost $150 billion; this current crisis will probably cost a multiple of that. The scale of fraud is immense. This whole bank scandal makes Teapot Dome [of the 1920s] look like some kid's doll set. Unless the current administration changes course pretty drastically, the scandal will destroy Barack Obama's presidency. The Bush administration was even worse. But they are out of town. This will destroy Obama's administration, both economically and in terms of integrity.

You Can't Handle the Truth

Secrecy is not playing well, nor should it. Check out the Tech Ticker video, especially the last 20 seconds.

Also from Tech Ticker:

A New York Times story, citing officials involved in the government's stress test, which declares 'all 19 banks undergoing the exams will pass them. '

This point ... is a continuation of what many believe is a hoax (or outright crime) being perpetrated on the American people by its government.

How do we know? One thing is certain: Trust is not an option.

S&L Crisis Reformist: Gov-Industry Cover-Up Is Huge

Update: Black's response can be read at Black's response to bloggers.

William K. Black, senior regulator during the 1980s S & L crisis and associate professor of economics and law, says the government understates the immense scale of exotic financial products fraud and is lying about the current health of our financial system to prevent a meltdown.

Confidence is oxygen, pointed out Warren Buffett last October. I keep up my hope that Obama is simply rolling out the recovery program (and sparing us all the details) so as not to scare the hell out of everyone, thinking that the immediate effects of the recovery ought to be different than a shock-and-awe campaign. But secrecy doesn't exactly work well nor should it in democracies, right?

A rolled-out truth and outright lying don't work at all, in Black's view. Here's an excerpt from his interview with Bill Moyers broadcast last Friday night. About the scariest stuff on the crisis I have read yet:

WILLIAM K. BLACK: ... What would happen if after a plane crashes, we said, 'Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We want to be forward looking.' Many people might have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No. We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend lots of money on, get really bright people. And we find out, to the best of our ability, what caused every single major plane crash in America. And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record. We ought to follow the same policies in the financial sphere. We have to find out what caused the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. And here, we've got a double tragedy. It isn't just that we are failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. We're failing to learn from the successes of the past.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: In the Savings and Loan debacle, we developed excellent ways for dealing with the frauds, and for dealing with the failed institutions. And for 15 years after the Savings and Loan crisis, didn't matter which party was in power, the U.S. Treasury Secretary would fly over to Tokyo and tell the Japanese, 'You ought to do things the way we did in the Savings and Loan crisis, because it worked really well. Instead you're covering up the bank losses, because you know, you say you need confidence. And so, we have to lie to the people to create confidence. And it doesn't work. You will cause your recession to continue and continue.' And the Japanese call it the 'lost decade'. That was the result. So, now we get in trouble, and what do we do? We adopt the Japanese approach of lying about the assets. And you know what? It's working just as well as it did in Japan.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: You are.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it's foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, 'We just can't let the big banks fail.' That's wrong.

BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.

Geithner Looks to Make Banks Lend and What Else

Update: Do read William K. Black on The Prompt Corrective Action Law, and Black's interview on the Bill Moyers show.

Geithner: We Won't Hesitate to Change Management at Banks; banks will lend or the bankers will be out of a job.

An increasing number of Americans will judge the policy addressing the banking crisis on the basis of how Americans are affected. Odd.

See Noam Chomsky on the economy and democracy. Plan is recycled Bush/Paulson. We need nationalization and steps towards democratization.

"When the Associated Press sent journalists to interview bank managers, investment firm managers, and asked them what they'd done with the TARP money [Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)], they just laughed. They said 'it's none of your business, we're private enterprises. Your task, the public, is to fund us, but not to know what we're doing. But the government could find out.'"

Much of the American public, veering into populism aka democracy, sees the financial managers as the incarnation of the voracious mafia chief, Fausti 'the Fist' Dellacava, in Jimmy Breslin's I Don't Want to Go to Jail.

The Fist often simplified questions over the allocation of resources by decreeing, "Give me all the money."