This image is the cover for the book Inside Job, Forbidden Bookshelf

Inside Job, Forbidden Bookshelf

New York Times Bestseller: A history of the S&L scandal that caused a financial disaster for American taxpayers: “Hard to put down” (Library Journal).

For most of the 20th century, savings and loans were an invaluable thread of the American economy. But in the 1970s, Congress passed sweeping financial deregulation at the insistence of industry insiders that allowed these once quaint and useful institutions to spread their taxpayer-insured assets into new and risky investments.

The looser regulations and reduced federal oversight also opened the industry to an army of shady characters, white-collar criminals, and organized crime groups. Less than 10 years later, half the nation’s savings and loans were insolvent, leaving the American taxpayer on the hook for a large hunk of the nearly half a trillion dollars that had gone missing.

The authors of Inside Job saw signs of danger long before the scandal hit nationwide. Decades after the savings and loan collapse, Inside Job remains a thrilling read and a sobering reminder that our financial institutions are more fragile than they appear.

Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker, Paul Muolo

Stephen P. Pizzo is a former real estate broker who, in 1982, purchased a small-town newspaper called the Russian River News in Northern California. Stephen did not have any journalistic experience or training, but intended to revitalize the failing publication and resell it. Instead, he discovered that the local savings and loan, which had been deregulated along with the rest of the nation’s thrift institutions, was making risky loans to out-of-town borrowers with shady pasts. His investigations led to a network of crooked contractors, grifters, and organized crime figures that stretched from coast to coast. After national newspapers did not show interest in picking up the story, he decided to begin work on a book, which became Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans. Stephen is also the coauthor of The Ethic Gap: Crisis of Ethics in the Professions and Profiting from the Bank and S&L Crisis. His investigative reporting has won the Lincoln Steffens Award for Journalism, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book of the Year Award, the Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement Award, the Sonoma State University Project Censored Award, and the Sail America Southam Award. Pizzo is now retired and living in Sebastopol, California, with his wife Susan.
 

Open Road Integrated Media