The recently passed "financial reform bill" -- by design -- will NOT prevent a repeat of big bank crashes and consequent additional taxpayer bailouts ...proving once again our government to be "Of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich."

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (speaking on the new financial reform bill): "There will be no more tax-payer funded bailouts, period. If a large financial institution should ever fail, this reform gives us the ability to wind it down without endangering the broader economy."

WILLIAM K. BLACK, ASSOC. PROF. ECONOMICS AND LAW, UMKC (commenting on Obama's statement above): "Now, that is nonsense. There is nothing in the bill that will prevent that. Actually, there's nothing in any bill that really could ensure that you would never have those circumstances."



PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN (after listing to Black's discouraging answer to his first question): "And there's no—nothing in the current bill will change this?"

BILL BLACK (excerpt): "No. And indeed, more generally, there's nothing to fix rating agencies." ... "Americans don't know that over 10 percent of all appraisers in America have signed a petition calling for the government to step in and regulate and enforce [the rating agencies] because of this Gresham's dynamic. A Gresham's dynamic is where cheaters and the least moral people prosper, and they drive the honest, moral people out of the marketplace. (emphasis added)"



Bio

William K. Black, author of THE BEST WAY TO ROB A BANK IS TO OWN ONE, teaches economics and law at the University of Missouri — Kansas City (UMKC). He was the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black developed the concept of "control fraud" — frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a "weapon." Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae's former senior management.

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