William Black is a former bank regulator and author of "The Best Way To Rob a Bank Is To Own One" - via
Naked Capitalism:
What do you get when you throw together economic fraudsters,
plutocrats and opportunistic criminals? A financial crisis, that’s what.
If you look back over the massive frauds that have swept the country in
recent decades, from the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to the
2007-'08 financial crash, this deadly combination always appears.
A dangerous cycle begins when prominent economists pander to
plutocrats and bought politicians, who reward them with top posts, where
they promote the perverse economic policies that cause fraud epidemics.
Crises develop, and millions of people are ripped off. Those who fight
for truth are ignored or ruined. The criminals get wealthier, bolder and
more politically powerful, and go on to hatch even more devastating
cons.
The three most recent financial crises in U.S. history were driven by
a special type of fraud called “control fraud” — cases where the
officers who control what look like legitimate entities use them as
“weapons” to commit crimes. Each time, Alan Greenspan, former chairman
of the Federal Reserve, played a catastrophic role. First, his policies
created the fraud-friendly (criminogenic) environment that produces
epidemics of control fraud, then he failed to identify those epidemics
and incipient crises, and finally, he failed to counter them.
