New Economic Perspectives-
This is the second in my series of articles based on the FBI’s most (2010) “Mortgage Fraud Report.”
In my first column I began the explanation of how many analytical conclusions one can draw from a close reading of what is left out of the FBI report.
In particular, I emphasized the death of criminal referrals by the SEC and the banking regulatory agencies. The FBI report implicitly confirms the investigative reporting of David Heath that first quantified the death of criminal referrals by the banking regulatory agencies.
Because banks will not make criminal referrals against their own CEOs, this means that criminal referrals have virtually vanished against the “accounting control frauds” that drive our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. As George Akerlof and Paul Romer explained in their famous 1993 article (“Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit”) the death of prosecutions of the controlling officers of banks will lead to accounting control fraud becoming a “sure thing.”
[M]any economists still seem not to understand that a combination of circumstances in the 1980s made it very easy to loot a financial institution with little risk of prosecution. Once this is clear, it becomes obvious that high-risk strategies that would pay off only in some states of the world were only for the timid. Why abuse the system to pursue a gamble that might pay off when you can exploit a sure thing with little risk of prosecution? (1993: 4-5).