Bill Black refreshingly blunt on rampant fraud in the banking system

What a relief to hear Bill Black speak plainly yesterday in his testimony on the failure of Lehman Brothers before the House Financial Services Committee today. A text of his prepared remarks can be found here (PDF).
“Let’s start with the repos. We have known since the Enron in 2001 that this is a common scam, in which every major bank that was approached by Enron agreed to help them deceive creditors and investors by doing these kind of transactions.
And so what happened? There was a proposal in 2004 to stop it. And the regulatory heads — there was an interagency effort — killed it. They came out with something pathetic in 2006, and stalled its implication until 2007, but it’s meaningless.
We have known for decades that these are frauds. We have known for a decade how to stop them. All of the major regulatory agencies were complicit in that statement, in destroying it. We have a self-fulfilling policy of regulatory failure because of the leadership in this era.”

Bullshit has baffled brains for years on this. It is an embarrassment and a repulsive failure of leadership, morals and oversight. To move forward, we have to finally declare and acknowledge this fraudulent system and start fresh.