First, we had Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke talking about "green shoots" and how the recession will come to an end this year. Now we have Lawrence Summers, director of the White House's National Economic Council saying that the economic disaster will come to an end in the next few months.

Based on the data so far, you would think the Obama administration is trying to talk up the economy. You restore confidence, and people start spending again.

But William Black, Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention warns that this amounts to a cover up. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Black says it's a cover up.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: You are.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it's foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, "We just can't let the big banks fail." That's wrong.

BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG - and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.

How important is hope, the kind of stuff the Obama administration is peddling? Black reminds us that the Dutch who 400 years ago were fighting what seemed like an impossible war against the world's most powerful nation, Spain, had a motto: "It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere."

"Now, going forward, get rid of the people that have caused the problems. That's a pretty straightforward thing, as well. Why would we keep CEOs and CFOs and other senior officers, that caused the problems? That's facially nuts. That's our current system," Black says. "So stop that current system. We're hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. Stop that, because you need good information to make good decisions, right? Follow what works instead of what's failed. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure. That would be another nice place to start. There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they've had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks. And by the way, the folks who are the better regulators, they paid their taxes. So, you can get them through the vetting process a lot quicker."