Summers. He's just an average person in a world where the average person is a crook.

And the sickening stench hasn't ended. The same greedy, destructive Boomers and Gen-Xers who brought about this disaster are continuing to do so and continuing to lie about it.

One of the slimiest performances I've seen was last week's presentation at Washington's Economic Club by Lawrence Summers, White House National Economic Council. Summers bragged about his life's accomplishments and then, smiling smugly, he said, "I think the sense of a ball falling off the table -- which is what the economy has felt like since the middle of last fall -- I think we can be reasonably confident that that's going to end within the next few months and you will no longer have that sense of freefall."

Well, you can just look at the above graph and see that he's lying. Industrial production figures in all the G7 (developed) countries have been like "a ball falling off the table." And you can look at all sorts of other data. There's absolutely nothing to justify Summers' claims.

Now, I don't really care if someone makes a lot of money, even someone like Summers, who made $5.2 million in 2008 from hedge funds, plus $2.7 million in speaking fees, and who also consulted for hedge funds when he was President of Harvard University. If the Harvard University trustees don't care, then why should I care?

But I'm offended when someone like that becomes the economic front man for the Administration, and then openly lies, especially after a year of hearing a lot of crap during the campaign that the Obama administration was going to be completely open and honest, without even the appearance of impropriety.

But I don't mean to pick on just Summers. He's just an average person in a world where the average person is a crook. The same generations of people who perpetrated the fraud, who created the worthless mortgage-backed securities and worthless CDS securities contracts, and sold them to the public as risk-free AAA securities are still in charge. Those people haven't disappeared; they're still pulling scams. They're just using new variations, to take advantage of this year's opportunities.

I've been writing about these scams for years, as regular readers of this web site know. One of the most disgusting was the subprime mortgage company that I wrote about last year in January. They had made huge sums of money by defrauding thousands of people by talking them into lying on their mortgage applications, and had defrauded the lenders through these falsehoods.

The reason that that story caught my attention was that the Boomer executive vice president Walter Buczynski, 59, was married to a Gen-X wife, 37. When the company went bankrupt, the wife decided to dump the husband and take the kids (why not?), in order to get as much money as possible. Buczynski killed his wife, then killed himself.

And even after all this, the remaining company officers were in bankruptcy court requesting that all remaining money be split among them as bonuses, rather than give it to some of the people who had been defrauded.

For some reason, this story epitomizes all that's been going on. Greedy, selfish, destructive Boomers and Gen-Xers, willing to destroy anyone else's life for their own gain, and committing further destruction when their attempts are foiled. The standard today in government, business and journalism is of dishonesty and unethics (is that a word?).

I recall a job interview from late 2007, just after the credit crisis began. (For why I was looking for a job, see "Boomers and Gen-Xers: Dumbing down IT / How Digimarc Corp. self-destructed.") I was talking to a company VP, and as was my obsessive habit, I warned him that there was a great deal of fraud going on in the world, and that he should make sure that his company's assets were safe. He said, "So you think everyone in the world is a crook?" I knew he thought I was nuts, and of course I didn't get the job.

So what's interesting to me now is that the stories behind all of these frauds that I've been writing about for years are starting to come out. If anything, what I wrote in the past underestimated the situation.

I've written about the "culture of complicity" that pervades today, and the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that proves that people were knowingly committing fraud.

In a airing of Bill Moyer's journal, William K. Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, described what's been going on:

"BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that these complex instruments were deliberately created so swindlers could exploit them?


WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, absolutely. This stuff, the exotic stuff that you're talking about was created out of things like liars' loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, "the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined."

BILL MOYERS: So if your assumption is correct, your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency that is supposed to test the value of these assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both parties are committing fraud by intention.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right, and the investment banker that — we call it pooling — puts together these bad mortgages, these liars' loans, and creates the toxic waste of these derivatives. All of them do that. And then they sell it to the world and the world just thinks because it has a triple-A rating it must actually be safe. Well, instead, there are 60 and 80 percent losses on these things, because of course they, in reality, are toxic waste."


Black doesn't name any names, unfortunately, but makes a general argument like the one I'm making -- that the fraud was so massive, that everyone must have been involved.

In another part of the interview, he does name two government regulators who failed to do their jobs:

"WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.


These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator."

Black indicts both Treasury Secretaries -- Hank Paulsen and Timothy Geithner -- and I can only agree. In this "culture of complicity," neither of them could blow the whistle or tell the truth without exposing their own complicity in the repeated fraud.

Another article, written in December, does name names, and gives specifics for how the fraud was perpetrated.

The article was written by Michael Lewis. In the 1980s, at age 24, with no business experience whatsoever, he stumbled into a job paying him a six-figure salary to advise investment bankers about something he knew nothing about. After a few years, he got out while the getting was good, and wrote a book called Liar's Poker about his experiences:

"I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.
Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual."

Lewis was shocked at this response at the time, and indeed it's still shocking today. These were Generation-X students at Ohio State University looking for ways to get into the business of defrauding people. What kind of college must Ohio State University be to graduate a class of crooks? It's pretty safe to say that ethics is not a strong point at Ohio State...

Generational dynamics