Former Regulator: Geithner 'a Disaster'

William Black was a regulator during the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s, and now he’s back as a tough critic of the Obama administration in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. Black tells Newsweek that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is a “disaster” who “has been wrong about everything in his career.” The Obama administration, as a whole, is hardly better: “Nothing they're trying for would have prevented the current crisis had it been in place, and it's very unlikely that it will prevent crisis in the future.” As a point of reference, Black points out that, during the S&L crisis, regulators convicted more than 1,000 people. Today, there have been zero convictions. At the height of the S&L worries, there were 1,000 FBI agents on the case. In late 2006, there were only 150 FBI agents working on mortgage fraud.