Linked to offshore entities in Ireland, Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Brazil, Russia, Ecuador, Saudi Arabie, UAE, residing in California.
The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry
Deposit insurance has proved to be the crack cocaine of American finance,” Martin Mayer writes in
The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry,
about the S&L crisis. That one memorably nasty line sheds more
light on the S&L disaster than any of the half-dozen books written
about the scandal. Mayer gets it, and it’s about time someone did. Oh,
sure, he retells the standard S&L horror stories of Charles Keating
defrauding little old ladies, of crooked Texas daisy chains and
self-dealing loans, of all the larceny that we taxpayers will be paying
for over the next 50 years. But that’s not what his book is about.
Mayer is the first chronicler of the S&L crisis to concentrate on
the forest and not the trees.
If the trees are the crooks who took over
the S&L industry in the 1980s, then the forest is Washington,
D.C., where a combination of naiveté, ineptitude, bad faith, and
cravenness made crookedness both likely and inevitable. The
government’s deregulation of a once closely regulated industry was bad
enough, but by raising federal deposit insurance on individual accounts
from $40,000 to $100,000 in 1980, it guaranteed that the new
”entrepreneurial” owners of S&Ls were taking no risks when they
gambled with their depositors’ money. The government became the
ultimate safety net, and the S&L industry became a giant Ponzi
scheme.
Mayer is clearly offended by the
politicians who took big campaign contributions from S&L
”constituents,” and he is not much kinder to the regulators who looked
the other way while the industry burned. But he reserves his most
withering scorn for ”the law firms, accounting firms, and investment
banks that permitted some of their partners and executives to conspire
with criminals and even rewarded them for it.” He makes this case
convincingly, and when he writes that ”The CPAs who took the big fees
to certify the books for these S&Ls were really coconspirators,”
you have no doubt that he is right. These are the people Mayer has
spent much of his life writing about, and you can’t help suspecting
that he now feels betrayed by them. That, in the end, is what makes him
so angry. It should make you angry too.
https://ew.com/article/1990/11/23/greatest-ever-bank-robbery-collapse-savings-and-loan-industry/
