William K. Black J.D. Ph.D. 

William Black was a deputy director at the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. during the thrift crisis of the 1980s, and now serves as an associate professor, teaching economics and law at the Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City. He teaches White-Collar Crime, Public Finance, Antitrust, and Law & Economics. He says the current bank scandal dwarfs the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis -- and could destroy the Obama presidency. The scale of fraud is immense. The title of his talk will be "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One," also the name of his book. In a Business Week column about his book, it says, "It is a general theory of how dishonest CEO's, crony directors, and corrupt middlemen can systematically defeat market discipline and conceal deliberate fraud for a long time -- enough to create massive damage."