the, the the most people don't understand the global financial system and how financial resources are distributed. or the dominant financial group, of course or, or the united states and u. k bikes. their objective is their hit gemini, controlling the world's money flows, grants the power to wipe in time nations of the face of the globe moving some,

save this to put in 3 in global me so upset the blue coke space. think of and i'm a political the national legit petition gives him the business. when we lived on a guy the he didn't play the good thing. the goal is to integrate you out a whole that were to present the apple store any clear or seek us at the feed. me see, oh, the one go down. from the all new to these old pre read off the . the

they were all keenly attuned to the issue of bank fraud. here on the show, we'd spoken to numerous whistle blowers who have told us about money laundering, income, tax evasion, and illegal offshoring of assets. that's all complicated enough to make matters worse. imagine having to do so with little support in the policy and regulatory communities for even in congress. that's what our next guest has found himself up against. i'm john kerry ok, welcome to the whistle blowers the

. 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 to the united states has been home to countless banking scandals over the decades from the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to the great recession of 200820092 the collapse of lehman brothers bear stearns and others. there seems to be a cycle where bankers go hog wild, they allow their agreed to get the better of them. their banks and investment firms collapse. congress expresses shock info outrage. no regulations are implemented and then retracted. and then the entire cycle just starts over again. this is the system that we've given ourselves. it's one that fosters and rewards corruption in the name of free market capitalism. but sometimes the good guys actually when our next guest is one of those good guys, he was a central figure in exposing congressional corruption, including among some of the most powerful figures in the body during the savings

and loan crisis, which he brought to national attention. he correctly called the collapse of the us housing market in 200820098 ponzi scheme and said that the bank programs to provide loans to people not able to pay them, was a criminal act. and he testified before congress that the collapse of major us investment houses was not a result of poor investment decisions. but instead, the result of fraud. bill black is an associate professor of economics and law at the university of missouri at kansas city where he teaches white collar crime, public finance, anti trust law and economics, as well as latin american development. he's a former executive director of the institute for fraud prevention. he has taught at the lyndon b johnson school of public affairs at the university of texas at austin as well as at santa clara university. the professor black was litigation director at the federal home loan bank board, deputy director of the savings and loan oversight body. the f s l i see general

counsel of the federal home loan bank of san francisco, and senior deputy chief council of the office of thrift supervision. he's the author of many books and his book, the best way to rob a bank is to own one, which was published in 2005 is considered to be a classic in the genre. professor black, welcome back to the show. we're happy to have you. you have been a leading voice for smart banking regulation for decades. indeed, you were the person who exposed one of the biggest governmental scandals since watergate tell us how you got involved in the issue of banking, banking regulation and the investigation of bank fraud. sure, the heroes in the story are the least powerful folks in the organization. the bank examiners, in our case, the thrift examiners. these are the folks that actually go into the field and look at the loans. and they also look at what you claim is your underwriting standard.

and then they look at a sample of loans to see whether you actually do these things. and one of the, we did the examiners early on possible to the q you were inside. and the key inside was this the worst of savings and loans. ultimately there were 300 of these rod schemes are making loans in a way that is certain to cause them massive losses and you're going, well, that's crazy, right. and then the, the insight was yes, but it will make the ceo incredibly wealthy. because the c e o is looting and the best way to loot is a to control the bag and be to use accounting and see typically making bad loans works far better in terms of the economy. and so that's

principally how they tend to do it. now sometimes they add in coordination, and this in the united states context tends to be aimed against blacks, hispanics, particularly those who speak primarily spanish, up and the elderly. and you can combine these 2 things, looting, and prediction. let's walk through these scandals. one at a time. one of the biggest was called the kidding 5. the kidding 5 were 5 us senators including john mccain and john glenn, who were involved in a bank scandal that was a part of the savings and loan collapse. you had such a major impact on the revelation of and on the investigation into this scandal that charles keating, after whom the scandal was named, set in a memo, quote, get black, kill him dead, and quote,

tell us about the heating 5 and about the aftermath. right, so 1st it isn't just the keating 5 working with the cheating 5 was speaker of the house. jim. right. and the speaker of the house is the answer to the trick question . who was the 2nd most powerful elected official in america? you ain't the vice president, it's the speaker of the house under our constitution and the rules of the house. right. and so these folks up, and by the way, that means 5 of the 6 were democrats. you know, all of this including that you said some very prominent democrats in. ready getting to war heroes, as you mentioned, don glen and the son of ad moment thing. right? you know all of this. so the reason that they use these senators is that

other things have fail. so this one you really love, they use trading crap. i am not exaggerating. charles keating, literally got a mole appointed by president reagan and one of the 3 presidential slots. his name was lee hankle and i blew that's the 1st person i believed was a lot. right, so he's one of our 3 bosses presidential pin point. he's running the agency and that is only because the other guy that, that in regular ministration also agreed to a point. but miracle of miracle was blocked by weird political stop involving yet another war here of bob. all right, so otherwise cheating. but for the weird miracle of bob dole blocking

this other cheating, the pointy, the agency was run by 3 people who would have given the majority to charles, getting the most notorious fraud. so i blow the whistle on hankle and the f. b, i begins an investigation and he, he hankle had actually been bought and paid for. right. they had them just dead to rights. but they agreed and they being the justice department to allow him to resign and avoid prosecution. and then a host of things happened, and as i said, they're using all these opt the accountants. they had not one, but ultimately 3 of the big 8 audit firms. and they would get these in man,

in kind of criminal letters from the audit firm, saying that they've never seen anything like these regulators. we were out of control. we were felt mean at them out, you know, the type of thing. we had all kinds of hospitals here, age. we had a majority of the house of representatives at the behest of charles, getting a majority of the house of representatives co sponsored a resolution saying do not re regulate the industry as we were doing. and that majority included every senior member of the leadership of both the republicans and the democrats in the house of representatives. the reagan administration, the office of management and budget threatened to make a criminal referral against the head of our agency. and the grounds for the

criminal referral was that we were supposedly closing too many in solvents, savings and low. now our job is closing its all the tech and so they were going to have to keep the man for that bill. you've been a regular presence on capitol hill over the years, testifying before myriad committees on these issues, and you've never pull any punches. i know from my own time on capitol hill that it's regular practice for outside experts to write. most of the legislation, whether it's lobbyist attorneys, or substantive experts, you certainly fit that bill. have congressional leaders ask you for your expertise in crafting legislation to prevent future bank scales. tom frank uh you know, the great the a journalist just story and he has a ph. d. history of too often talk to me about

during the great financial crisis about this any. and he and the obama administration building the video. yeah. the living room of our home in kansas city . yeah. which they set out to 6000000 folks allegedly because john beginning of course was one of the feeding 5. and the point i was making is john mccain was still making the same mistakes or, you know, supporting st kind of bad policies that had led to that kind of disaster. so tom frank knew that things going, so you know, when are you going to get the senior position? and i, and 3 minutes later when i can start up laughing, i said, you know, basically 70000000 people would have to died or take a, having me and they would certainly never make the regulator, the head of the national commission. you know,

to investigate the causes of the great financial crisis. why did you make me the chief investigator? but of course it knew that there was no way the republicans would allow that to, to happen. so, uh, i have, i do it from the outside. i mean, i do have a, a 10 top with 1600000 to get on. uh, some of these things uh it, and many journalists, they have uh asked me about it as you say, a different than that. um, i'm very blunt to thank you, bill. we're speaking with bill black, a law professor and banking whistleblower about his experiences examining corrupt banking practices. we're going to take a short break and come back and talk about banking regulation and how to make it stay state to. 2 2 2 2 the,

the international course i understand you tuesday due to this sunday, go over that, which governs on stage. the results here. you know, who makes the rules adobe in the situation where we should be governed by some of this system with the rules. well, i know that's quite a difficult i have, i do not know what the rules of the rules based into next to get off the lease of russian states. never as i've started as i'm sort of the most sense

community best ingles, all sense and up in the system must be the one else holes. question about this, even though we will then in the european union, the kremlin machine, the state on the rush of funding and supports the r t smith. net keeping our video agency roughly all the band on youtube, the payment services for the question, did you say steven twist, which is the welcome back to the suppliers? i'm john kerry. i could were speaking with professor bill black about corruption in

the banking industry. bill. it's good to have you with us. thanks again to bill, you've made something of a cottage industry of providing warnings in the banking sector. what are you currently seeing? and several regional banks failed across the us earlier this year. that sent shock waves through the industry, but should we have been shocked? should we expect more failures? the terrible thing about this is one we did the significant parts of the law based on lies and based on the scam that we were helping little institutions with that had nothing to do with it. it was all about helping institutions in the $100000000.00. and above range off and up to $250000000000.00. the really scary thing about these failures is they're the equivalent of a big sailing ship capsizing because there

was an 8 not wind economic times in the united states. yeah. there been pressures? oh, there was some inflation for a, you know, a time. but, you know, pretty modest by any historical stuff. okay, so what this, these recent failures show you 261 the incentives for the managers, the senior managers of the bags are still incredibly perverse. which is the biggest stress what i've been saying for 2530 years. and the 2nd thing is the regulators have largely collapsed as effective forces, right? we read it and we have to re establish effective examiners again. the heroes of

the piece to be able to deal with this because the l. i'll start with the regular tory part 1st. you. it never made sense to allow these institutions to make the kind of risk that they were taking. here's why. the risk were in jargon, a symmetrical. in other words, if things went bad, we all settings. we pay for it. if things went good, then the ceo and the senior managers would make a ton of money. but on top of that, they did it in circumstances when things were almost certainly going to go bad in the sense that there, it was clear that the fed was pushing up interest rates. if the fed pushes up interest rates aggressively, interest rates will go up. and so if you been taking

a bath, the interest rates will fall. you will lose money. but your bonus will go up as a c, e o and as a cfo. and so that's what they did and they didn't just deliberately took interest rate risk if you're going to take interest rate risk. so a run is like pneumonia, right? pneumonia is often the thing that kills you at 1st. but something underlying major, really sick and often puts you in the hospital, right. and then pneumonia can kill you in 24 hours to opportunistic disease. well, the same thing there, the most analogous thing in finance is a run liquidity problems. and the thing you want to do

absolutely, to minimize, that is to make sure your deposit are fully insured. and in the united states that was over while we leave the nor this is very different than europe, as you may well know. where many large banks have money that is primarily uninsured, and therefore it makes a whole lot of sense for depositors to every stage of run on the back. but in the united states, traditionally, even very large banks have been over well mainly ensure the banks that got in trouble and failed were ones that decided, hey, let's bring in a ton of uninsured money by the federal government, not protected by the f b. i see there is no upside for society. one piece of legislation that came out of congress in the early 2 thousands was something called the sarbanes

oxley that had to do with compliance. and by all accounts it worked with that said bakers hated it. they seem to hate. most regulations. sarbanes oxley has now lapsed . is the making industry better off with it or without it sharpens, actually quite accurately english does at get on. right? said you, you need good internal control. so that's what it's all about in internal controls, are you actually know what's happening at your institution? and you're acting appropriately in light of that knowledge was the 2nd part. but the 2nd part was assumed, right? they assume that the bankers simply didn't know. whereas the top bankers were a problem didn't know, and i just wanted to hide it. so what are the bankers do when they implemented sarbanes oxley? they went to the most anal, most bureaucratic means of implementing it possible. they hired outside top

audit firms, who here's a shock created a one size fits all documents, which sometimes when they sold you, they hadn't even figured out that they hadn't raised the prior banks name in the form document. so we got to sell the same thing. hundreds of times it made a ton of money, but there was no real buy in at the bank. so, sorry, friends actually is right. they their internal controls sucked. but surveys actually assumed it was because they just didn't know how to make good controls. they know how to make good controls for a 100 years. they have crappy controls because they don't want to alert the regulators to the problem. they want to perverse incentives because the perverse incentives turn it out. it assures thing for the managers

economist still talk in terms of what the bank wants, what the banks, incentives are, what the bank is seeking to accomplish. banks are depot. they have though, instead of they have no ability to protect themselves from managers. it's all about what the managers want and share the modern executive compensation according to the economist who created the concept as produce the disaster. is there any appetite on capital hill to enact legislation to prevent future bank failures and tell us about the regulatory environment on capital hill? is the executive branch willing to stand up to the bankers we just in the savings a loan, tobacco bearable regulations often that we have inherited from our predecessors. and while much of what we did was to re

regulate the industry, much of what we did was not even under the weeks stuff precisely because the fraudsters really, you know, they wrapped it up to the equivalent of a 150 miles an hour. so the frogs tend to get cruder because they can get away with it. so even though it's, you can be successful if you know of the 20, the equivalent of the joe selby and mike patriarch, it as a regulatory head despite everything that in today's, you know, it would be a combination of republican and democrat. busy legislators tried to do, you could have very effective regulation, but it would have to come from the president the united states. he or she would have to actually appoint leaders that needed to do the right thing. let me give you another example of them right?

by the way, 1st cousin of med, i was appointed head of the 1st regulatory agency after i blow the whistle and the head of our agency who gave them to the g 5 and to speak right. had to resign and disgrace along with the other member. right. tim ryan then continued that a shopping. he actually inherited the enforcement action against the son of the president, the united states of america. alternatively huh. and as a result of that, the white house called the general counsel the f b i c said, is there any way you can get this taken away this action taken away from the office of direct supervision, which is the federal trip regulatory agency. the tim ryan was leaving and the

general counsel dining pepper. i went to bill shipment the head of the agency and said, hey, i got this thing for the white house. and statements said don't go, you know, close to it with the 20 foot pool. and the general counsel anyway, norris's boss, i called tim ryan the head of the 1st regulatory agency and pictures this. we get this taken away from you. this action against the president's son. dom ryan. god bless them. does an ethics referral? i'm the general counsel the up the i'd say and so that's why you don't see tim ryan, who is the republican voters again. professor william black, thank you so much for being with us. anyone who wants to tackle corruption has to be willing to go all the way. sometimes that means all the way to the top. there

are no short cuts to ensuring honesty and transparency. and it is incumbent on people in positions of authority. whether the elected officials, business leaders, or anybody else, to ensure that the rules are followed and that there's respect for the rule of law . but that's not real life. greed is a powerful motivator, and that's why we need whistle blowers, whistle blowers like bill black. thanks for joining us for another episode of the whistle blowers i'm john kerry onto we'll see you next time. 2 2 2 2 the the

yes, law right now, moving up, i give a shit, a position associated with the local church. so certificate of boulevard too much and watch coolers, which was a john bullshit. so don't that in the cause of the room and attend the want to know heart, that of all our other choose coupled impression. some of the stuff we need for you plus the yesterday, which is kind of charlotte. i'm with a number of words somewhere else in what is coming up. so let me just confirm that i will start following charter decrypt daughter. get on your new north share service and love scored. good bye. my baby sister told k. a booby recently did. i did. did you validate

the the, the largest hospital in gal, so it is on the brink of completely running parts of fuel with the local health ministry. seeing a catastrophe. it is that it comes honestly, is really prime minister sais. the attacks will continue on. crucial diesel supplies will not be allowed in these really refusing a temporary truce that doesn't include the release of all of these or it will not table beyond from fuel into the us secretary of state to express its sympathy for a policy then in the searing is trip to israel before once again, fully support.