Fraude e o "Stress Test" de Mr. Geithner

Para o economista William Black, expert em regulação bancária, o stress test de Geithner é um esquema... fraudulento!: “There is no real purpose [of the stress test] other than to fool us. To make us chumps”. Em sua entrevista ao blog Naked Capitalism, ele aponta:

" The regulators are overwhelmed because of personnel cuts (particularly heavy among their best, most experienced examiners that had worked banks that had engaged in sophisticated frauds. Buyouts were common, because more experienced examiners appear more expensive. This isn't true when you consider effecitiveness and productivity, but management didn't care about that. Treat what I write after the colon as hearing from me at my most serious and thoughtful: it is vastly more difficult to examine a bank that is engaged in accounting control fraud. You can't rely on the bank's books and records. It doesn't simply take more, far more, FTEs -- it takes examiners with experience, care, courage, and investigative instincts and abilities. Very few folks earning $60K are willing to get in the face of the CEO and CFO making $25 million annually and tell them that they are running a fraudulent bank and they are liars. FYI, this is one of the reasons why having "resident examiners" never works. The examiners don't even get to marry the natives. They get to worship God's annoited. Effective examination is good for you, but it is very unpleasant, ala a doctor's finger up your rectum. It requires total independence. So, the examination force doesn't have remotely the numbers or the relevant experience and mindset to examine the largest banks with the greatest problems."

"...few examiners understand more exotic products. In my experience, nobody understands all the products. I certainly don't, and if I did I'm sure my knowledge would be out of date within weeks.

The problem is compounded by the fact that understanding how the product is actually used (CDS is a good example) v. how its proponents picture it as being used is essential. Understanding its sensitivity to credit and interest rate risk is well beyond the ken. Understanding the liquidity risks and interaction effects is out of the question.

Examiners rarely know that financial risks are not normally distributed, but have far fatter tails. (Nor do they understand why this makes truncating the VAR a recipe for disaster.) Examiners rarely understand that any econometric analysis undertaken during the expansion phase of a bubble will invariably find the strongest positive correlation with the worst possible business practices (because those practices maximize accounting fraud)."