Bill Mitchell has a really great piece up today at his wonderful blog, billyblog. After briefly discussing the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) emphasis on the operational realities of the monetary system, and asking whether or not it is important to situate those discussions of operations and macroeconomics in broader debates about ethics and morality, Bill…

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By William K. Black (Cross posted and Benzinga.com) Introduction This is the third column in my series discussing why the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have failed to investigate and prosecute successfully the largest and most destructive financial fraud epidemic in history. The series uses the FBI’s 2010 Mortgage Fraud report to tease…

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By William K. Black This is the second in my series of articles based on the FBI’s most (2010) “Mortgage Fraud Report.” In my first column I began the explanation of how many analytical conclusions one can draw from a close reading of what is left out of the FBI report. In particular, I emphasized…

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By William K. Black Three Bloomberg reporters have done the Nation a service by ferreting out a scandal of moderate magnitude but emblematic importance.  Dakin Campbell, Jody Shenn and Phil Mattingly broke the story on August 14, 2013 that Adam Glassner, recently described, but not named, in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) fraud suit against…

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By William K. Black The Obama administration’s continuation of the Bush administration’s refusal to prosecute the elite banksters (or even the vastly lower status CEOs of the fraudulent mortgage bank) that drove the crisis has made it clear that the rule of law no longer applies to wide ranges of life and that crony capitalism…

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By William K. Black This article discusses a simmering feud among five of the most prominent economists in the world (two of them Nobel Laureates).  It was prompted by the August 8, 2013 article by Raghuram Rajan, who has just been selected to run India’s Central Bank, entitled: “The Paranoid Style in Economics.”  (Note: I…

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Paul Krugman made a remarkable assertion last week about the dwindling legacy of Milton Friedman: … Friedman has vanished from the policy scene — so much so that I suspect that a few decades from now, historians of economic thought will regard him as little more than an extended footnote. Krugman’s efforts to deliver a disparaging judgment…

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Since the crisis of 2008, professional and academic economists have grown increasingly concerned that something is wrong with their profession.  Sometimes that anxiety springs only from the recognition that most of their colleagues failed to predict the oncoming crisis.  But sometimes a nearly opposite concern is voiced: We sometimes hear the complaint that economists are…

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Brad DeLong says he often wondered why Milton Friedman was willing to accept the need for government regulation in the world of money and banking, but not elsewhere: In my rare coffees and phone calls with Milton Friedman, I found I could distract him whenever I was losing an argument by saying: “Why is it…

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by William K. Black I have done a series of articles about the efforts of honest appraisers (which began in 2000) and loan brokers to alert the lenders, the markets, and the government to the twin fraud epidemics (appraisals and “liar’s” loans) committed by lenders’ controlling officers that drove the financial crisis. Honest appraisers could…

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