After blasting Bush, Paulson, Obama, Geithner and Summers on Bill Moyer's PBS show this past week, now Bill Black is doing more of the same in this week's Barrons Magazine. What Black says is consistent with what Economist Simon Johnson said in the Atlantic Magazine HERE. Excerpts from Black's interview in Barrons is below.
"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.
We have failed bankers giving advice to failed regulators on how to deal with failed assets. How can it result in anything but failure? If they are going to get any truthful investigation, the Democrats picked the wrong financial team. Tim Geithner, the current Secretary of the Treasury, and Larry Summers, chairman of the National Economic Council, were important architects of the problems. Geithner especially represents a failed regulator, having presided over the bailouts of major New York banks.
It is worse than a lie. Geithner has appropriated the language of his critics and of the forthright to support dishonesty. That is what's so appalling -- numbering himself among those who convey tough medicine when he is really pandering to the interests of a select group of banks who are on a first-name basis with Washington politicians.
We are using taxpayer money via AIG to secretly bail out European banks like Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, and UBS -- and even our own Goldman Sachs. To me, the single most obscene act of this scandal has been providing billions in taxpayer money via AIG to secretly bail out UBS in Switzerland, while we were simultaneously prosecuting the bank for tax fraud. The second most obscene: Goldman receiving almost $13 billion in AIG counterparty payments after advising Geithner, president of the New York Fed, and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former Goldman Sachs honcho, on the AIG government takeover -- and also receiving government bailout loans."
The full article is HERE[$].
"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.
We have failed bankers giving advice to failed regulators on how to deal with failed assets. How can it result in anything but failure? If they are going to get any truthful investigation, the Democrats picked the wrong financial team. Tim Geithner, the current Secretary of the Treasury, and Larry Summers, chairman of the National Economic Council, were important architects of the problems. Geithner especially represents a failed regulator, having presided over the bailouts of major New York banks.
It is worse than a lie. Geithner has appropriated the language of his critics and of the forthright to support dishonesty. That is what's so appalling -- numbering himself among those who convey tough medicine when he is really pandering to the interests of a select group of banks who are on a first-name basis with Washington politicians.
We are using taxpayer money via AIG to secretly bail out European banks like Société Générale, Deutsche Bank, and UBS -- and even our own Goldman Sachs. To me, the single most obscene act of this scandal has been providing billions in taxpayer money via AIG to secretly bail out UBS in Switzerland, while we were simultaneously prosecuting the bank for tax fraud. The second most obscene: Goldman receiving almost $13 billion in AIG counterparty payments after advising Geithner, president of the New York Fed, and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former Goldman Sachs honcho, on the AIG government takeover -- and also receiving government bailout loans."
The full article is HERE[$].
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