This is more articulate than I can be here. I would like to mention that Bill Black has been a personal hero of mine since the 1980s when he was very successful and aggressive in pursuing the crooks in the S&L swindles, working for the Reagan administration.
and a special Kudos to Professor Karen Ho, U of MN, author of Liquidated. Academics like her make me proud of our University.
Hmm. Were there supposed to be videos here? I'm on the iPad. Are we talking. The keating 5?
ReplyDeleteI'm on my laptop, and the videos show up and play just fine. Must be an ipad thing?
ReplyDeleteYup, we're talking the Keating 5 era, although Black went after a LOT of bad guys in that one.
His past was brought up re: John McCain and that particular scandal in the 2008 election cycle.
From the HuffPo
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/05/mccains-keating-5-scandal_n_132103.html, back in the fall of 2008):
A former federal regulator with intimate knowledge of the savings-and-loan scandal recently told HuffPost's Seth Colter Walls that McCain is repeating mistakes from the Keating era:
William Black -- a deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation during the "Keating Five" scandal that nearly ended McCain's political career -- says the Arizona Republican's chief errors at the time were underestimating the importance of regulation and relying too heavily on slanted advice from captains of industry.
"In the S&L crisis, he took his advice from the worst [kind of] criminal. Charles Keating is the person he went to for his policy advice," Black said. "Now, he certainly is getting advice from Phil Gramm, Carly Fiorina, Rick Davis -- the whole group of economic and top political advisers are lobbyist types. He just doesn't seem to get it, ever, that the advice is going to favor their clients. Even if they just stop being lobbyists, you can't just turn that off instantly. It's their mind state that develops. ... The biggest lesson is that, when you deregulate and de-supervise, you create an environment where control fraud emerges. You hyper-inflate bubbles; you get criminalization."
As a kid I was a financial industry geek....
KR, please, DO elaborate.
ReplyDeleteExplain to us what 'criminal bubbles' you are accusing the government of 'doing', and be sure to indicate who benefits...... and how unregulated, 'dark' markets are an improvement.
Be sure to tell us as well how the Republicans aren't even more in the thick of those bubbles.
Videos not on phone either. :-(. I had heard McCain just got bad advice. Interesting that he's still using the same M.O. I think that tells us something now doesn't it.
ReplyDeleteHe was given good advice as well as bad advice at the time; he had more than enough warning that he was making a mistake and chose to ignore it. My recollection is that he was getting a good bit of campaign money from those about whom he chose to ignore warnings too.
ReplyDeleteCampaign finance reform on his part was in some measure an attempt to redeem himself from that embarrassment. In that respect it had a certain self-serving quality to it.
Sorry the embeds are not workign for you; I wish I knew how to improve that.