William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, was formerly the litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), senior vice president and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel of the Office of Thrift Supervision. Black was also deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.
He developed the concept of “control fraud”—frauds in which the CEO or head of state uses the entity as a “weapon,” and which cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined.
He recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s former senior management. He also testified before the Senate Agricultural Committee on the regulation of financial derivatives and the House Governance Committee on the regulation of executive compensation.
Currently a professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he was the executive director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention from 2005-2007. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
