Black is Back

Bill Black speaks with Dan Froomkin - and goes all hammer and tongs about the under reported aspects of the ongoing financial mess:

The things I think are critical and badly underreported are:

1. The astonishing amount of mortgage fraud (literally, millions of cases annually) and how it hyperinflated the bubble and led to the Great Recession.

2. The fact that these mortgage frauds were overwhelmingly due to consciously fraudulent lending practices in which the CEOs of seemingly legitimate entities used accounting tricks as their “weapon of choice” to report higher profits and get bigger bonuses. (George A. Akerlof and Paul R. Romer got it right in the title to their 1993 article: Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.)

Like a refreshing bucket of ice water to the head. It's just a pity we're lost in a blizzard.

(H/t CJR's Ryan Chittum, naturally)