Feel Free Read Belly Up: The Collapse of the Penn Square Bank Kindle
On July 5, 1982, when Phil Zweig's investigative reporting on the reckless energy lending practices of Oklahoma City's Penn Square Bank finally forced regulators to shutter the obscure shopping center institution, few would have predicted that the bank’s collapse would trigger what was then the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression. It wreaked havoc throughout the global financial system and led to the failure of other banks, notably Seattle-First National Bank in 1983 and giant Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust a year later. In fact, in many ways the Penn Square debacle set the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. Most significant, the 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois by the federal government gave rise to the "Too Big to Fail" doctrine, which governed the bailouts of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Citigroup, and AIG, among others. Other parallels between the Penn Square and subprime mortgage scandals are remarkable. Penn Square and its big bank partners lent billions to wannabe oilmen on the basis of imaginary oil and gas reserves and pie-in-the-sky expectations that oil prices would soar to more than $100 per barrel by the end of the 1980s. Likewise, less than two decades later, a new generation of greedy, irresponsible money peddlers embarked on the biggest, most disastrous lending spree of all time, foisting mortgages on unsophisticated borrowers who didn't have a hope or a prayer of ever repaying them. Often, they assured the borrowers not to worry because housing prices would go up forever.Indeed, if bankers, policymakers, financial regulators, investors and consumers had heeded the lessons of Penn Square and BELLY UP, the financial crisis that began in 2008 would never have happened in the first place. BELLY UP tells the amazing true story of Penn Square with brilliant reporting, delicious detail, and an unbelievable yet all-too-real cast of characters, from the ambitious young geologist who convinced banks to invest huge amounts of money in a vast new gas field, to the banker who drank amaretto out of his Gucci loafers while lending millions to every con artist and wildcatter with a lease, a rig, and a dream.
