The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery

...He assumes good motives on the part of too many actors in the drama and treats financial laws as essentially .sound when not unduly distorted...

...Indeed, government officials betrayed a conspicuous lack of memory (and principle) when they announced plans in 1991 to deregulate the banking sector as a cure for its problems-the same argument that produced the disastrous Gain-St...

...These considerably less compelling causes----changes in federal and state legislation combined with complex fluctuations in economic indicators--produced the graft and looting upon which the media has subsequently focused...

...Even dogmatic Marxists could not have painted a more disturbing picture of the collusions of "late" capitalism...

...The Bush team consistently downplayed the extent of the debacle during the presidential campaign of 1988 and the Democrats (Wright, DeConcini, Glenn, Cranston) were themselves too close to the stink to complain overmuch...

...But Marxists would never have imagined such a sexy story...

...Mayer eschews the overly dramatic in an attempt to explain, in often bewildering detail, the internal dynamic of the S&Ls' collapse...

...His explanations of interest margins, Fannie Maes, and other intricacies of the S&L issue illuminate an otherwise murky subject...

...This was not, Mayer implies, the market as Adam Smith intended...

...But the disease of distancing wielded inexorable power and took over the entire organism...

...Unfortunately, however, Mayer is simply not cynical enough to produce an entirely satisfying account of the S&Ls...

...Yes, there were times and places of temporary remission, or even specious health...

...What the S&L crisis has shown, however, is the extent to which a politically committed administration can bend the laws of finance and economics to its own purposes...

...Instituting the Gain-St...

...It reminds me of a doctor who does weeks of sophisticated testing to diagnose a lifethreatening illness, only to offer sugared water as a cure...

...the less a reader knows, the more confusing the rapid transition from one period, author, topic to another...

...Third, the tests are flawed by the failure to provide clear categories: The word "symbol" is used in so many different ways that I gave up trying to assign it any specific meaning--yet symbolism is what the book purports to be about...

...Cooke suggests that the first Christians' healthy awareness of God-present-in-therisen-Lord did not require "religion...

...Instead, Congress followed the deregulatory spirit of Reaganism to the letter...

...Institutionalization placed leaders in the position of mediating salvation...

...Mayer also spends considerable space criticizing the operation created to clean up the mess, the Resolution Trust Corporation, as well as predicting similar convulsions in the commercial banking system...

...Risk under capitalism should not be insured...

...He begins with what he considers an original state of health: First Jesus' "Abba experience" gave an immediate sense of God's presence in all of life's circumstances, and then the primitive church's experience of the Spirit appropriated that "Abba experience...

...His approach is etiological...

...Development, in his treatment, is decline...

...Here's the diagnosis: Cooke wants to show how in Christianity the experience of God has been "distanced" by the way in which symbols have developed and been used...

...First, its rapidity invites the typical problem: The more the reader knows about tile many authors covered, the less willing the assent to Cooke's thumbnail characterizations...

...Yet, the virus of alienation from God's presence was introduced almost at once-even within the New Testament writings--as Jewish structures of authority and worship moved the community toward institutionalization and "ritual," and as Hellenistic hankering for abstraction led the community toward doctrine...

...As Mayer points out, the manipulations did not end when Congress finally decided to investigate more closely the industry it had so cavalierly deregulated at the beginning of the decade...

...IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE...

...complains about the use of a philosophy of "participation" without taking the time to explain what he means by it and why we should all agree it is worse than "presence...

...By the late 1970s, the S&L industry had begun to undermine its once solid foundations...

...His is not a radical's dissection of capitalism's corpse (consult Robert Sherrill's seering article in the Nation, November 19, 1990) nor an apologist's downplaying of the affair's significance (consult the Wall Street Journal...

...Capitalism, he laments, was simply not allowed to function properly...

...Martin Mayer's grand narrative of frontier finance supports a diverse cast of regional highrollers, Wall Street sharpies, corrupt politicians, shrewd criminals, compliant accountants, and inept bureaucrats who meet and bargain, bumble and plot, advance millions and pocket billions of dollars...

...They created "daisy chains" in which parcels of land were sold back and forth, raising the price and therefore the book value of the plot each time, and creating "profitable" portfolios for what were essentially failing institutions...

...Rather than fail in an increasingly competitive atmosphere, the S&Ls grew like deadly oversized mushrooms...

...financial institution ties together more convincingly than any conspiracy theory the strands of economic adventurism and deregulatory swagger characteristic of Reaganism...

...Instead, Mayer offers a liberal critique...

...uses phrases such as "ordinary experience" as though they had self-evident significance...

...Mayer's elucidation of the financial components of the problem is admirable...

...With finance, crime, and "Dallas "-style high living, the newspaper and publishing industry have had a sure-fire winning combination that has generated a string of expos6s...

...Roosevelt gave us the New Deal...

...Despite its racy title, Martin Mayer's The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery is precisely the sobering account that economic specialists prefer...

...Reagan has left us only the Great Pyramid Scam, a financial syphilis that unless radically treated will wreak damage in the body economic for many generations to come...

...The S&L crisis, a disease with flamboyant symptoms, has complex internal causes which excite only the specialists...

...Cooke traces the sad stages of this chronic sickness through the Patristic, Medieval, Reformation and Renaissance, and Modem periods...

...Less publicized are the sweetheart deals from the latter part of 1988--which redistributed the remaining riches of the S&Ls to America's wealthiest businessmen...

...John Feffes" lthough its roots extend back into previous administrations, the savings and loan crisis perfectly encapsulates all the venality, hypocrisy, and naivet6 of the Reagan years...

...Thanks to Milken et al., S&Ls filled their portfolios with junk bonds to finance further loans...

...Those in the S&L industry began to cash in political favors (for all those contributions made to political campaigns...

...Johnson attempted a Great Society...

...Ritual became formalized and distant...

...Charles Keating's activities 1June 1991:375 in this regard are widely known...

...Neither political party distinguished itself in the drama...

...As a theological proposition, that has some merit, even if at this stage of the conversation it is scarcely threatening or novel...

...This semantic slipperiness and concep376: Commonweal...

...THE DISTANCING OF GOD The Ambiguity of Symbol in History and Theology Bernard J. Cooke Fortress, $24.95,381 pp...

...Another clinician might detect some flaws in this epidemiological survey...

...Doctrine became hopelessly complex and opaque...

...Nor is the S&L situation simply a mistake with large but finite proportions that can, with sacrifice, be borne (by the victims, by the way, not the perpetrators...

...Yet the more titillating aspects of these expos6s-extravagant parties fueled by champagne and cocaine, inside jobs by criminal elements, million-dollar private jets, tracts of worthless overvalued land--are frequently distracting...

...high risk should not therefore be highly insured...

...Still, Mayer points out, if the govemment had merely recognized in the early 1980s that the S&Ls were sick institutions, had closed them all, and paid off the deposits, the loss would have been comparatively small...

...Luke Timothy Johnson bat Bernard Cooke r e a l l y wants to argue in this book is that the proper starting point for thinking about God is the experience of God in people's lives...

...Instead of slowing the false growth, Gain-St...

...The most puzzling feature of this book, in fact, is that Cooke labors so long reaching the thesis (and even then does not state it so clearly), and that so much of that labor seems misdirected...

...And yet the S&Ls maneuvered themselves with government assistance into this peculiar win-win situation...

...Germain legislation which opened the floodgates in 1982...

...Germain bill in 1982, Congress removed many of the regulations that kept S&Ls within certain bounds...

...Helped by a government which, among other things, raised the ceiling for deposit insurance to $100,000, the industry began to resemble the classic pyramid structure: old loans were paid off by new loans, increasing the size of the institution but jeopardizing its solvency...

...Similarly, the author talks about Jesus' "Abba experience," as though it were widely known what this consisted in...

...Second, the data does not bend so easily to the tests put to it, forcing Cooke to acknowledge as many exceptions as instances...

...Much of this is familiar, though Cooke's clinical procedures are distinctive on two counts: He tests for the same three symp- ~ toms through an unusually ambitious range of literature, and he extends the discussion through the Reformation and Renaissance into the period when the acids of modemity made it more and more difficult even to find the "body" called Christianity, diseased or well...

...Thus he can with clear conscience concentrate on fmancial manipulations instead of the more general political and economic trends associated with the Reagan revolution...

...To cover their trails, the S&Ls paid off accountants to certify that they were healthy while the management continued to skim money off the top...

...Germain allowed the pyramid scam to grow...

...The rise and fall of this major U.S...