Interview with Bill Black on Moyers
Regular readers of this blog know that William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One, a history of the S&L crisis, wrote a prescient history of the U.S. banking industry for us a couple of years ago. (A shorter version of the piece was the cover story in our Nov/Dec 2007 issue; a longer version appeared in our anthology Real World Banking and Finance, which was published in January of 2008.) Bill Black was one of the regulators whom the “Keating Five” tried to deceive, and he has been in the media quite a bit over the past year or so, first during the presidential election commenting on John McCain’s unfitness to even be a senator (McCain was one of the Keating Five), and more recently to comment on the role of “control fraud” in the current financial meltdown. He did a terrific interview with Bill Moyers last week. Hat-tip to LF.
BILL MOYERS: For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.” In fact, [William K. Black] wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s.
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The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L’s in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating—after whom the senate’s so-called “Keating Five” were named—he sent a memo that read, in part, “get Black—kill him dead.” Metaphorically, of course. Of course.
Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one—not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname “banksters.”
Bill Black, welcome to the Journal.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Thank you.
Read the full transcript.
Watch the video.
