Saving Face: An Alternative and Personal Account of the Savings & Loan Crisis

Saving Face: An Alternative and Personal Account of the Savings & Loan Crisis

Credit markets frozen. New housing frozen. Record foreclosures. Circular arguments about government responsibility and government fixes. Class action suits by investors. Criminal investigations. If this sounds familiar in 2008, it’s because we lived it before. SAVING FACE is author Bill King s retelling of the savings and loan collapse and its aftermath. Enlivened by his often harrowing experiences as a major player in that industry, SAVING FACE narrates the ways in which the S&L crisis affected the everyday lives of real people at every level of the economy. King shows that eerily similar forces are at play today. King documents the origins of the collapse in Depression era policies that went awry in the 1970s. He then shows how the government, instead of proactively addressing the problem, ignored and denied the very existence of a problem. Ultimately, when the crisis could no longer be swept under the rug, Congress and government regulators blamed the fiasco on S&L crooks. But in 1993 an independent Federal Commission debunked the S&L crook explanation, declaring: It is important to realize that fraud was not the cause of the S&L debacle. Through hundreds of interviews and meticulous research, King traces the true dynamics of the collapse, drawing comparisons to intervening crises — even scandals — in government contracting and securities regulations, all the way to the sub-prime meltdown of 2007 – 2008 and the hat-in-hand reality of major financial institutions going begging for survival funds overseas. SAVING FACE shows in vivid detail how we repeat a cycle of almost willful ignorance, and resulting pain from Wall to Main — for reasons that need not be. In his final section, Lessons Learned, King shows us the beginning of an end to economic insanity, making SAVING FACE a cautionary must-read for every concerned American.

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