Interview with Former Federal Financial Regulator/
Professor/Author William K. Black
Bill Moyers' Journal-Friday, April 4, 2009

<http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript3.html>www.pbs.org/moyers/\
journal/04032009/transcript3.html

The Friday night broadcast of this PBS interview
was suddenly and completely cut off at the point
indicated -- right when it was clearly and
forcefully stated that the United States
Government -- particularly the present Secretary
of the Treasury -- was violating the Prompt
Corrective Action Law of 2007, and that our
entire financial system is essentially a
deliberately unregulated Ponzie scam benefiting
the New World Order facilitated by the September 11th terrorist attacks.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal. 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, the man you're about to meet
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.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: These numbers as large as they
are, vastly understate the problem of fraud.

BILL MOYERS: Bill Black was in New York this week
for a conference at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice where scholars and journalists
gathered to ask the question, "How do they get
away with it?" Well, no one has asked that
question more often than Bill Black.

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-callled
"Keating Five" were named — he sent a memo that
read, in part, ""get Black — kill him dead." We
assume 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. Butt 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.

BILL MOYERS: I was taken with your candor at the
conference here in New York to hear you say that
this crisis we're going through, this economic
and financial meltdown is driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Fraud is deceit. And the
essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and
then I betray that trust, and get you to give me
something of value." And as a result, there's no
more effective acid against trust than fraud,
especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.

BILL MOYERS: In your book, you make it clear that
calculated dishonesty by people in charge is at
the heart of most large corporate failures and
scandals, including, of course, the S&L, but is
that true? Is that what you're saying here, that
it was in the boardrooms and the CEO offices where this fraud began?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: How did they do it? What do you mean?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, the way that you do it is
to make really bad loans, because they pay
better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other
words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third
thing you do is we call it leverage. That just
means borrowing a lot of money, and the
combination creates a situation where you have
guaranteed record profits in the early years.
That makes you rich, through the bonuses that
modern executive compensation has produced. It
also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road.

BILL MOYERS: So you're suggesting, saying that
CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in
order to increase their own personal income,
deliberately set out to make bad loans?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: How do they get away with it? I
mean, what about their own checks and balances in
the company? What about their accounting divisions?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: All of those checks and
balances report to the CEO, so if the CEO goes
bad, all of the checks and balances are easily
overcome. And the art form is not simply to
defeat those internal controls, but to suborn
them, to turn them into your greatest allies. And
the bonus programs are exactly how you do that.

BILL MOYERS: If I wanted to go looking for the
parties to this, with a good bird dog, where would you send me?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that's exactly what
hasn't happened. We haven't looked, all right?
The Bush Administration essentially got rid of
regulation, so if nobody was looking, you were
able to do this with impunity and that's exactly
what happened. Where would you look? You'd look
at the specialty lenders. The lenders that did
almost all of their work in the sub-prime and
what's called Alt-A, liars' loans.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Liars' loans--

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Liars' loans.

BILL MOYERS: Why did they call them liars' loans?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they were liars' loans.

BILL MOYERS: And they knew it?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: They knew it. They knew that they were frauds.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Liars' loans mean that we don't
check. You tell us what your income is. You tell
us what your job is. You tell us what your assets
are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check
on any of those things. And by the way, you get a
better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets.

BILL MOYERS: You think they really said that to borrowers?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: We know that they said that to
borrowers. In fact, they were also called, in the trade, ninja loans.

BILL MOYERS: Ninja?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yeah, because no income
verification, no job verification, no asset verification.

BILL MOYERS: You're talking about significant American companies.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Huge! One company produced as
many losses as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.

BILL MOYERS: Which company?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: IndyMac specialized in making
liars' loans. In 2006 alone, it sold $80 billion
dollars of liars' loans to other companies. $80 billion.

BILL MOYERS: And was this happening exclusively
in this sub-prime mortgage business?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: No, and that's a big part of
the story as well. Even prime loans began to have
non-verification. Even Ronald Reagan, you know,
said, "Trust, but verify." They just gutted the
verification process. We know that will produce
enormous fraud, under economic theory,
criminology theory, and two thousand years of life experience.

BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that these complex
instruments were deliberately created so swindlers could exploit them?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, absolutely. This stuff, the
exotic stuff that you're talking about was
created out of things like liars' loans, that
were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it
was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A
rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk.

So you take something that not only has
significant, it has crushing risk. That's why
it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it
has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a
fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody
looking, during the Bush years.

So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a
Congressional investigation of some of these
rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came
out. What we know now is that the rating agencies
never looked at a single loan file. When they
finally did look, after the markets had
completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting
Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, "the
results were disconcerting, in that there was the
appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined."

BILL MOYERS: So if your assumption is correct,
your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending
company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency
that is supposed to test the value of these
assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both
parties are committing fraud by intention.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right, and the investment
banker that — we call it pooling — puts
together these bad mortgages, thesse liars'
loans, and creates the toxic waste of these
derivatives. All of them do that. And then they
sell it to the world and the world just thinks
because it has a triple-A rating it must actually
be safe. Well, instead, there are 60 and 80
percent losses on these things, because of course
they, in reality, are toxic waste.

BILL MOYERS: You're describing what Bernie Madoff
did to a limited number of people. But you're
saying it's systemic, a systemic Ponzi scheme.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, Bernie was a piker. He
doesn't even get into the front ranks of a Ponzi scheme...

BILL MOYERS: But you're saying our system became a Ponzi scheme.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Our system...

BILL MOYERS: Our financial system...

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Became a Ponzi scheme.
Everybody was buying a pig in the poke. But they
were buying a pig in the poke with a pretty pink
ribbon, and the pink ribbon said, "Triple-A."

BILL MOYERS: Is there a law against liars' loans?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not directly, but there, of
course, many laws against fraud, and liars' loans are fraudulent.

BILL MOYERS: Because...

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they're not going to be
repaid and because they had false
representations. They involve deceit, which is the essence of fraud.

BILL MOYERS: Why is it so hard to prosecute? Why
hasn't anyone been brought to justice over this?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they didn't even begin
to investigate the major lenders until the market
had actually collapsed, which is completely
contrary to what we did successfully in the
Savings and Loan crisis, right? Even while the
institutions were reporting they were the most
profitable savings and loan in America, we knew
they were frauds. And we were moving to close
them down. Here, the Justice Department, even
though it very appropriately warned, in 2004,
that there was an epidemic of S&L fraud.

BILL MOYERS: Who did?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: The FBI publicly warned, in
September 2004 that there was an epidemic of
mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to
continue it would produce a crisis at least as
large as the Savings and Loan debacle. And that
they were going to make sure that they didn't let
that happen. So what goes wrong?

After 9/11, the attacks, the Justice Department
transfers 500 white-collar specialists in the FBI
to national terrorism. Well, we can all
understand that. But then, the Bush
administration refused to replace the missing 500
agents. So even today, again, as you say, this
crisis is 1000 times worse, perhaps, certainly
100 times worse, than the Savings and Loan
crisis. There are now only one-fifth as many FBI
agents as worked the Savings and Loan crisis.

BILL MOYERS: You talk about the Bush
administration. Of course, there's that famous
photograph of some of the regulators in 2003, who
come to a press conference with a chainsaw
suggesting that they're going to slash, cut
business loose from regulation, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, they succeeded. And in
that picture, by the way, the other — three of
the other guys with pruning shearrs are the...

BILL MOYERS: That's right.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: They're the trade
representatives. They're the lobbyists for the
bankers. And everybody's grinning. The
government's working together with the industry
to destroy regulation. Well, we now know what
happens when you destroy regulation. You get the
biggest financial calamity seen by anybody under the age of 80.

BILL MOYERS: But I can point you to statements by
Larry Summers, who was then Bill Clinton's
Secretary of the Treasury, or the other Clinton
Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin.
I can point you to suspects in both parties, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There were two really big
things, under the Clinton administration. One,
they got rid of the law that came out of the
real-world disasters of the Great Depression. We
learned a lot of things in the Great Depression.
And one is we had to separate what's called
commercial banking from investment banking. That's the Glass-Steagall law.

But we thought we were much smarter, supposedly.
So we got rid of that law, and that was
bipartisan. And the other thing is we passed a
law, because there was a very good regulator,
Brooksley Born, that everybody should know about
and probably doesn't. She tried to do the right
thing to regulate one of these exotic derivatives
that you're talking about. We call them CDFS's.

And Summers, Rubin, and Phil Gramm came together
to say not only will we block this particular
regulation. We will pass a law that says you
can't regulate it. And it's this type of
derivative that is most involved in the AIG
scandal. AIG all by itself, cost the same as the
entire Savings and Loan debacle in the late 1980s.

BILL MOYERS: What did AIG contribute? What did they do wrong?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: They made bad loans. Their type
of loan was to sell a guarantee, right? And they
charged a lot of fees up front. So, they booked a
lot of income. Paid enormous bonuses. The bonuses
we're thinking about now, they're much smaller
than these bonuses that were also the product of
accounting fraud. And they got very, very rich.
But, of course, then they had guaranteed this toxic waste. These liars' loans.

Well, we've just gone through why those toxic
waste, those liars' loans, are going to have
enormous losses. And so, you have to pay the
guarantee on those enormous losses. And you go
bankrupt. Except that you don't in the modern
world, because you've come to the United States,
and the taxpayers play the fool.

Under Secretary Geithner and under Secretary
Paulson before him... we took $5 billion dollars,
for example, in U.S. taxpayer money. And sent it
to a huge Swiss Bank called UBS. At the same time
that that bank was defrauding the taxpayers of
America. And we were bringing a criminal case
against them. We eventually get them to pay a
$780 million fine, but wait, we gave them $5
billion. So, the taxpayers of America paid the
fine of a Swiss Bank. And why are we bailing out
somebody who that is defrauding us?

BILL MOYERS: And why...

WILLIAM K. BLACK: How mad is this?

BILL MOYERS: What is your explanation for why the
bankers who created this mess are still calling the shots?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that, especially after
what's just happened at GM, it's scandalous.

BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of
GM, and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One,
they're much closer to the bankers. These are
people from the banking industry. And they have a
lot more sympathy for them. In fact, they're
outright hostile to working people, as you can
see. They want to bash all of their contracts.
But when they get to banking, they say, "sacred
contracts". But the other element of your
question is we don't want to charge the
bankers,because if we do, if we put honest people
in who didn't cause the problem, their first job
would be to find the scope of the problem. And
that would destroy the cover up.

BILL MOYERS: The cover up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Sure. The cover up.

BILL MOYERS: That's a serious charge.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Of course.

BILL MOYERS: Who's covering up?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is covering up. Just
like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly
saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a
trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion
taxpaxpayer dollars to deal with this problem.
But they're allowing all the banks to report that
they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized.
Both statements can't be true. It can't be that
they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.

These are all people who have failed. Paulson
failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, Geithner has, was one of
our nation's top regulators, during the entire
subprime scandal, that I just described. He took
absolutely no effective action. He gave no
warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI
warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All
this pig in the poke stuff happened under him.
So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator.

BILL MOYERS: But he denies that he was a
regulator. Let me show you some of his testimony
before Congress. Take a look at this:

VIDEO OF TIMOTHY GEITHNER APPEARING BEFORE A
CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE: I've never been a
regulator, for better or worse. And I think
you're right to say that we have to be very
skeptical that regulation can solve all of these
problems. We have parts of our system that are overwhelmed by regulation.

BILL MOYERS: Overwhelmed by regulation! It
wasn't the absence of regulation that was the
problem, it was despite the presence of
regulation you've got huge risks that build up.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, he may be right that he
never regulated, but his job was to regulate. That was his mission statement.

BILL MOYERS: As?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: As president of the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York, which is responsible
for regulating most of the largest bank holding
companies in America. And he's completely wrong
that we had too much regulation in some of these
areas. I mean, he gives no details, obviously. But that's just plain wrong.

BILL MOYERS: How is this happening? I mean why is it happening?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Until you get the facts, it's
harder to blow all this up. And, of course, the
entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts.

BILL MOYERS: What facts?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: The facts about how bad the
condition of the banks is. So, as long as I keep
the old CEO who caused the problems, is he going
to go vigorously around finding the problems? Finding the frauds?

BILL MOYERS: You--

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Taking away people's bonuses?

BILL MOYERS: To hear you say this is unusual
because you supported Barack Obama, during the
campaign. But you're seeming disillusioned now.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, certainly in the
financial sphere, I am. I think, first, the
policies are substantively bad. Second, I think
they completely lack integrity. Third, they
violate the rule of law. This is being done just
like Secretary Paulson did it. In violation of the law.

We adopted a law after the Savings and Loan
crisis, called the Prompt Corrective Action Law.
And it requires them to close these institutions.
And they're refusing to obey the law.

BILL MOYERS: In other words, they could have
closed these banks without nationalizing them?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, you do a receivership.
Ronald Reagan did receiverships,
and nobody called it nationalization.

BILL MOYERS: And that's a law?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: That's the law.

BILL MOYERS: So, Paulson could have done this? Geithner could do this?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not could. Was mandated--

BILL MOYERS: By the law.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: By the law.

BILL MOYERS: This law, you're talking about.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: What the reason they give for not doing it?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: They ignore it. And nobody calls them on it.

BILL MOYERS: Well, where's Congress? Where's the press? Where--


AT THIS POINT, THE FRIDAY NIGHT PBS BROADCAST WAS SUDDENLY CUT OFF.


WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, where's the Pecora investigation?

BILL MOYERS: The what?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: The Pecora investigation.
During the Great Depression, we said, "Hey, we
have to learn the facts. What caused this
disaster, so that we can take steps, like pass
the Glass-Steagall law, that will prevent future
disasters?" Where's our investigation?

What would happen if after a plane crashes, we
said, "Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We
want to be forward looking. Many people might
have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No.

We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend
lots of money on, get really bright people. And
we find out, to the best of our ability, what
caused every single major plane crash in America.
And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record.

We ought to follow the same policies in the
financial sphere. We have to find out what caused
the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. And
here, we've got a double tragedy. It isn't just
that we are failing to learn from the mistakes of
the past. We're failing to learn from the successes of the past.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: In the Savings and Loan
debacle, we developed excellent ways for dealing
with the frauds, and for dealing with the failed
institutions. And for fifteen years after the
Savings and Loan crisis, it didn't matter which
party was in power, the U.S. Treasury Secretary
would fly over to Tokyo and tell the Japanese,
"You ought to do things the way we did in the
Savings and Loan crisis, because it worked really
well. Instead you're covering up the bank losses,
because you know, you say you need confidence.
And so, we have to lie to the people to create
confidence. And it doesn't work. You will cause
your recession to continue and continue."

And the Japanese call it the lost decade. That
was the result. So, now we get in trouble, and
what do we do? We adopt the Japanese approach of
lying about the assets. And you know what? It's
working just as well as it did in Japan.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy
Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and
others in the administration, with the banks, are
engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: You are.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are
scared to death. All right? They're scared to
death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they
admit the truth, that many of the large banks are
insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of
cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the
exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance.
And, by the way, you can rely on deposit
insurance. This is foolishness -- alright? Now,
it may be even worse than that. You can impute
more cynical motives. But I think they are at the
very least sincerely just panicked about, "We
just can't let the big banks fail." And that's wrong.

BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this
point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as
they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak,
or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd
giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how
horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.

BILL MOYERS: A.I.G. did?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: What we're doing with -- no,
Treasury and both administrations. The Bush
administration and now the Obama administration
kept secret from us what was being done with AIG.
AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored
banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary
Paulson's firm, that he had come from being CEO.
It got the largest amount of money. $12.9
billion. And they didn't want us to know that.
And it was only Congressional pressure, and not
Congressional pressure, by the way, on Geithner,
but Congressional pressure on AIG.

Where Congress said, "We will not give you a
single penny more unless we know who received the
money." And, you know, when he was Treasury
Secretary, Paulson created a recommendation group
to tell Treasury what they ought to do with AIG.
And he put Goldman Sachs on it.

BILL MOYERS: Even though Goldman Sachs had a big vested stake.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive stake. And even though
he had just been CEO of Goldman Sachs before
becoming Treasury Secretary. Now, in most stages
in American history, that would be a scandal of
such proportions that he wouldn't be allowed in civilized society.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, like a conflict of interest, it seems.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive conflict of interests.

BILL MOYERS: So, how did he get away with it?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: I don't know whether we've lost
our capability of outrage. Or whether the cover
up has been so successful that people just don't
have the facts to react to it.

BILL MOYERS: Who's going to get the facts?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: We need some chairmen or chairwomen--

BILL MOYERS: In Congress.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: --in Congress, to hold the
necessary hearings. And we can blast this out.
But if you leave the failed CEOs in place, it
isn't just that they're terrible business people,
though they are. It isn't just that they lack
integrity, though they do. Because they were
engaged in these frauds. But they're not going to
disclose the truth about the assets.

BILL MOYERS: And we have to know that, in order to know what?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: To know everything. To know who
committed the frauds. Whose bonuses we should
recover. How much the assets are worth. How much
they should be sold for. Is the bank insolvent,
such that we should resolve it in this way? It's the predicate, right?

You need to know the facts to make intelligent
decisions. And they're deliberately leaving in
place the people that caused the problem, because
they don't want the facts. And this is not new.
The Reagan Administration's central priority, at
all times, during the Savings and Loan crisis, was covering up the losses.

BILL MOYERS: So, you're saying that people in
power, political power, and financial power, act
in concert when their own behinds are in the ringer, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: That's right. And it's
particularly a crisis that brings this out,
because then the class of the banker says,
"You've got to keep the information away from the
public or everything will collapse. If they
understand how bad it is, they'll run for the exits."

BILL MOYERS: This week in New York, at this
conference, you described this as more than a
financial crisis. You called it a moral crisis.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because it is a fundamental
lack of integrity. But also because, if you look
back at crises, an economist who is also a
presidential appointee, as a regulator in the
Savings and Loan industry, right here in New
York, Larry White, wrote a book about the Savings and Loan crisis.

And he said, you know, one of the most
interesting questions is why so few people
engaged in fraud. Because objectively, you could
have gotten away with it. But only about ten
percent of the CEOs, engaged in fraud. So, 90
percent of them were restrained by ethics and
integrity. So, far more than law or by F.B.I.
agents, it's our integrity that often prevents
the greatest abuses. And what we had in this
crisis, instead of the Savings and Loan, is the
most elite institutions in America engaging or facilitating fraud.

BILL MOYERS: This wound that you say has been
inflicted on American life. The loss of workers'
income, and their security and pensions and
futures happened, because of the misconduct of a
relatively few, very well-heeled people, in very
well-decorated corporate suites, right?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right.

BILL MOYERS: It was relatively a handful of people.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: And their ideologies, which
swept away regulation. So, in the example,
regulation means that cheaters don't prosper. So,
instead of being bad for capitalism, it's what
saves capitalism. "Honest purveyors prosper" is
what we want. And you need regulation and law
enforcement to be able to do this. The tragedy of
this crisis is it didn't need to happen at all.

BILL MOYERS: When you wake in the middle of the
night, thinking about your work, what do you make
of that? What do you tell yourself?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: There's a saying that we took
great comfort in. It's actually by the Dutch, who
were fighting this impossible war for
independence against what was then the most
powerful nation in the world, Spain. And their
motto was, It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere.

Now, going forward, we need to get rid of the
people that have caused the problems. That's a
pretty straightforward thing, as well. Why would
we keep CEOs and CFOs and other senior officers,
that caused the problems? That's obviously nuts. That's our current system.

So stop that current system. We're hiding the
losses, instead of trying to find out the real
losses. Stop that, because you need good
information to make good decisions, right? Follow
what works instead of what's failed. Start
appointing people who have records of success,
instead of records of failure. That would be another nice place to start. T

There are lots of things we can do. Even today,
as late as it is. Even though they've had a
terrible start to the administration. They could
change, and they could change within weeks. And
by the way, the folks who would be the better
regulators are those who have paid their taxes.
So, you can get them through the vetting process a lot quicker.

BILL MOYERS: William Black, thank you very much
for being with me on the Journal.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Thank you so much.






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