Pas responsables, pas coupables

William Black explique ici que le scandale des S&L avaient conduit à la condamnation de milliers de personnes pour fraudes dans les années 80/90. Pour le subprime, rien. "La faute à pas de chance", "tout le monde le faisait" etc... Un témoignage de plus du fait que le subprime n'a pas vu le jour contre la power structure mais qu'il en est bien au contraire le rejeton. Voir l'interview de William Black sur ZH (8min). Voir aussi une interview récente d'Elliot Spitzer sur fora.tv qui note qu'un des drames de cette crise est la faiblesse du dispositif de sanction (il est nécessaire pour qu'il y ait un sentiment de justice mais aussi pour donner le sentiment que le crime ne paiera pas à l'avenir- l'inverse a été fait).

Extrait de l'interview de William Black pour ceux qui parlent anglais et qui n'ont pas le temps de regarder la vidéo linkée plus haut. Il n'y parle pas directement de l'absence de poursuites judiciaires mais de ce qui a permis la prospérité des banques quelques trimestres de plus: la manipulation comptable, souvent évoquée sur le Blogo (c'est l'assouplissement des règles comptables qui a amorcé le rebond boursier du printemps 2009).

PAUL SOLMAN: What would you have us do about the major financial institutions as they currently exist?

WILLIAM BLACK: First, stop them from getting bigger. The 19 largest institutions are what we call systemically dangerous institutions. Many of them are already insolvent on any real market value basis.

PAUL SOLMAN: What do you mean insolvent? I mean, they're reporting large enough profits, that they can give bonuses to their employees.

WILLIAM BLACK: They were able to get Congress to extort FASB, which is the Accounting Standards Board, to change the rules, so that you no longer have to recognize losses on your bad loans, unless and until you actually sell them.

PAUL SOLMAN: Extort FASB? Why would it be extorting FASB?

WILLIAM BLACK: They said, you will change the rules, and you will change the rules such that banks no longer have to recognize their losses, or we will remove your authority over the accounting rules, which is the whole reason for existence for FASB, right? So, that's extortion in anybody's language.

And for all those who still don't get just why the big banks don't care if they get even bigger and even more systematically riskier (and why the Fed is dying to regulate them, just so that ever more problems can be swept under the rug until it is too late).

PAUL SOLMAN: You see no arguments that keeping the system as it is, is a legitimate political objective?

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, then you are going to have recurrent crises that get bigger and are disastrous. The financial firms get this burst of short-term profits. They max out their personal bonuses of their executives. It's great for them, but it's terrible for the world.