S & L Hell: The People and the Politics Behind the $1 Trillion Savings and Loan Scandal
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The savings and loan debacle is the costliest scandal in the country's history. How could such a catastrophe have occurred?
The most remarkable thing about the collapse of the savings and loan industry is that so many of the major participants--the regulators, politicians, and S&L operators themselves--chose to do nothing as they watched problems mount and taxpayer liabilities grow. That choice was dictated by a variety of motives: greed, political self-interest, and even (sometimes) misguided good intentions. Whatever the motives, this collective interest in hiding the debacle made it certain that the industry's final fall would come with an enormous bang, one that would force administrations that professed a free market philosophy essentially to nationalize a majority of the nation's thrifts. As a result, the industry in many respects became one of the best examples of socialism in the U.S. economy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a hackle-raising expose of the S & L scandal, Day, who covered this financial disaster for the Washington Post , estimates that the debacle not only will cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion but will force the administration to nationalize the nation's thrifts. With a masterly grasp of her complex subject, she traces the scandal from an Ohio thrift's collapse in 1985 to the workings of the global banking system, and defines the roles that financial, political and criminal individuals or groups knowingly or unknowingly played following the Reagan era's thrift deregulation policies, which provided a ``license to gamble,'' especially in risky real estate loans. Day records that it was not until late 1991 that the Bush administration publicly recognized that the taxpayers would have to foot the bill for the S & L ``cleanup,'' a program of closing, seizing, and selling the $500 billion assets of failed trusts. So far, only a pittance has been recovered through legal prosecution of the guilty.
