MP3 www.4shared.com Guests: William K. Black, Matthew Stein Financial Fraud: In the first half of Sunday's show, Associate Professor of Economics and Law, William Black, joined George Knapp for a discussion on how our economic crisis has been brought about by deliberate fraud on the part of banks involved in real estate loans. The household losses in this crisis are estimated at a staggering 11 trillion dollars, he reported (by comparison, the S & L crisis of the 1980s was contained at $150 billion, he noted). Accounting fraud was carried out by mortgage bankers and affiliates of banks that weren't subject to governmental regulation. They issued what he called "liar's loans" that were guaranteed to provide huge bonuses for executives, while setting up home owners to certain failure when the real estate bubble burst, he detailed. Many predatory mortgage brokers targeted poor people and minorities, inflating appraisals, and debt-to-income ratios in order to qualify them for the loans, he continued. By 2006, there were over two million cases of this type of fraud a year, and banks were selling their problematic loans to Wall St. under false pretenses, said Black, who added that we could be looking at an even more intensified financial crisis down the road because the way government has responded to the crisis (such as the bank bailout) has made matters worse. For more, see Black's paper: The Virgin Crisis: Systematically Ignoring Fraud as a Systemic Risk. Disaster <b>...</b>
Finance
Dishonesty
Coast To Coast AM
Mr
Superpotatotomato
