Volume 36, Number 21 · January 18, 1990
The Ultimate Scandal
By John Kenneth Galbraith
Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans
by Stephen Pizzo, by Mary Fricker, by Paul Muolo
McGraw-Hill, 443 pp., $19.95
Other People's Money: The Inside Story of the S&L Mess
by Paul Zane Pilzer, with Robert Dietz
Simon and Schuster, 269 pp., $18.95
The Big Fix: Inside the S&L Scandal
by James Ring Adams
John Wiley, 308 pp., $19.95
Not before in our history have so many strong influences united to produce so large a disaster as in the current case of the savings and loan scandal. Bureaucratic inadequacy and incompetence, perverse ideology, money in large amounts for the political protection of flagrant rascality, public lack of interest, and (for a long while) neglect by the press and the triumph of a hands-off administration, which relieved the presidency of any serious responsibility for ostentatious larceny—all these were present. Only now is the result in its almost unbelievable magnitude forcing itself on the public consciousness. The scandal, to repeat, will stand as one of the most appalling such events in our civil history, and undoubtedly as the most expensive.
Review, 3016 words
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