The Best Way to Rob a Bank is To Own One – Bill Black Part 4

The weakness of regulations and resources to enforce accountability on the finance sector is by design. Regulators’ budgets have been gutted, and even weak laws made unenforceable. Unless individual bankers go to jail when they commit fraud, nothing will change. Bill Black on theAnalysis.news with Paul Jay. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. One more time, please don't forget the donate button at the top of the webpage. If you're watching on YouTube, come on over and donate at theAnalysis.news. Hit the subscribe button. Share it, the number one comment on YouTube is why aren't more people watching? A lot of people are watching, but we'd like a lot more, and if you share it, people will. This is part four of my series of interviews with Bill Black on what he calls control fraud. So please watch the earlier parts because again, we're just going to pick up where we left off and it will make more sense if you watch the previous ones first on theAnalysis, it's all on one page and on YouTube. Come to the YouTube, theAnalysis channel, and there'll be a playlist where all of this will be easy to find. So again, the docuseries titled The Con breaks down a lot of what happened during the financial crisis of 07/08, and here's another trailer from the film. Now, again, joining us to discuss the history and present state of control fraud is Bill Black, who is in the film The Con He was an adviser to its producers. Bill is an American lawyer and academic and author, and he wrote the book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. He's also an associate professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and specializes in economics and law. He's the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and if you've been watching this series, you'll understand just how profound a statement that is. Thanks for joining us again, Bill. Bill Black Thank you. Paul Jay All right. So we left off with [Roland] Arnall, the guy who helped construct Ameriquest's massive fraud scheme. As you said, Ameriquest becomes the largest mortgage fraud company in the world. He gets punished by becoming the ambassador to the Netherlands, which is an obviously suitable punishment, rather than going to prison, which seems to be the kind of punishment these executives seem to get. All right. So pick up the story from where we left off. Bill Black So this was the easiest crisis ever to prevent. While it was completely novel in 1990, we'd never seen it before, the examiners immediately got it right. But by 1994, we've got a whole trail of dead places from this fraud and predation and lots of examples, and then every year afterwards, it just becomes more and more blatant. Then we get the three greatest warnings in history about this disaster. So when people say no one could see this coming, What are you talking about? So let me tell you, the first one. The first one actually begins in 1998. Now, of course, you could say it began in 1990 when our examiners did it, but in 1998, the appraisal professional associations and their rivals began to meet together to try to develop a common response to this extortion of appraisers to inflate appraised values on homes. Paul Jay Let me just jump in here really fast in case there's somebody watching that didn't watch the earlier parts. The focus is on the bankers getting great fees for pushing appraisers to over-appraise houses, even though it hurt the interests of their own banks.