Obama's Financial Regulation Plan Doomed to Fail

President
Obama's financial regulation proposal is doomed to fail.

Why?

Because
it was developed by people who don't believe in regulation.

That's
the take of William K. Black, a profess of law and economics at the University
of Missouri-Kansas City.

Black
believes that the only way to prevent future financial meltdowns is to have
in place a regulatory system and prosecutorial system developed by people with
a proven track record.

People
like Michael Patriarca. And William Black

First
thing Black would do?

Implant
at every financial regulator an office of the chief criminologist.

"If
you look at the largest single area of losses in banks - it has been control
fraud," Black told Corporate Crime Reporter last week. "But
of course, institutionally, none of these financial regulatory agencies are
set up well to even spot or stop these kinds of fraud. They don't have
the training, they don't have the background, they don't have institutional
structures that focus on the criminality."

"So,
you would institutionalize. You put in place someone who knows about fraud,
the literature about crime and criminology. They need to think, before they
deregulate, whether they are producing what we refer to as a criminogenic environment
- an environment that is going to produce widespread crime."

There
are currently nineteen banks that the government says are too big to fail. Black
would reduce that number to zero - by shrinking their size.

He
would also beef up financial enforcement units across the country - and
rehire the 500 FBI white collar agents who were shifted over to work national
security cases post-911.

And
he would send them undercover into troubled banks.

"Once
you get in, you are going to discover literally on day one that the underwriting
has been removed," Black said. "You are going to discover no later
than day two that the internal controls are gone and that indeed people get
in trouble for saying no to bad loans. By week one, you will have identified
several people who used to work at six other big places. That's how this
industry worked. And they will tell you the names - oh yeah, Fred is the
disastrous CFO over there."

Black
would also turn the executive compensation system on hits head.

"You
say - you can't get paid except on the basis of long term performance,"
Black said. "You can get your $200,000 a year. And then you show us you
produce the long term performance. And you show us that the long term performance
gains were due to your efforts, as opposed to everyone in the same industry
producing the same results."

[For
a complete transcript of the Interview with William K. Black, see 23 Corporate
Crime Reporter 26(13), June 29, 2009, print edition
only.]