William Black’s five fatal flaws of finance
William Black is a white-collar criminologist who has written a compelling account of how the bloated parasitic financial sector is ruining America in his recent post at Huffpo. These are Black’s five “fatal flaws” of finance:
1. The financial sector harms the real economy. Even when not in crisis, the financial sector harms the real economy. First, it is vastly too large.
2. The financial sector produces recurrent, intensifying economic crises here and abroad.
3. The financial sector’s predation is so extraordinary that it now drives the upper one percent of our nation’s income distribution and has driven much of the increase in our grotesque income inequality.
4. The financial sector’s predation and its leading role in committing and aiding and abetting accounting control fraud combine to: A) Corrupt financial elites and professionals, and B) Spur a rise in Social Darwinism in an attempt to justify the elites’ power and wealth.
5. The CEOs of the largest financial firms are so powerful that they pose a critical risk to the financial sector, the real economy, and our democracy.
The Solution: Fix the real economy, if you can find it. “The real economy came off the rails at least three decades ago for the great majority of Americans.”
I was highly impressed with William Black after seeing him interviewed by Bill Moyers. And now, after reading this detailed by accessible analysis, I’m even more impressed. We can’t begin to fix the economy unless we begin to implement basic principles we can actually understand. Fixing the real economy and making sure that finance is merely the servant of the real economy are clearly steps one and two, for each of the reasons listed by Black.
