Bill Black, associate professor of economics and law and leading investigator of financial fraud, discusses the rampant fraud and corruption in the financial system, the misguided response to the financial crisis by the government and solutions that would bring greater accountability and stability to the economy. Then Ellen Brown, chair and president of the Public Banking Institute, joins us to talk about the new Cypriot model of seizing depositor’s funds to bail out banks, whether that could happen in the US and the advantages of public banking.
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Bill Black and Ellen Brown on Big Finance Fraud and Public Banking by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud
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Relevant Articles and Websites:
Before Next Crash, Create Finance System that Serves Public, Part I: Shrink, Regulate Banks and Enforce Law by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Creating a Finance System that Serves the People, Part II: Remaking the Federal Reserve, Building Public Banks and Opting Out of Wall Street by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
The SEC Embraces Irony — its Enforcement “Inflection” “Point” by Bill Black
It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned for US and UK Depositors by Ellen Brown
How the Fed Could Fix the Economy and Why It Hasn’t by Ellen Brown
Michael Hudson: Public Banking Needed to Stop “Cannibalization” of the Economy on The Real News
Guests:
Bill Black is an associate professor of economics and law. He was the executive director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He previously taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Professor Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.
His book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One (University of Texas Press 2005), has been called “a classic.” Professor Black recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for OFHEO in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s former senior management.
He teaches white-collar crime, public finance, antitrust, law and economics, and Latin American development.
Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Brown developed an interest in the developing world and its problems while living abroad for eleven years in Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. She returned to practicing law when she was asked to join the legal team of a popular Tijuana healer with an innovative cancer therapy, who was targeted by the chemotherapy industry in the 1990s. That experience produced her book Forbidden Medicine, which traces the suppression of natural health treatments to the same corrupting influences that have captured the money system. Brown’s eleven books include the bestselling Nature’s Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, which has sold 285,000 copies.