Badlands Book Club: The Creature From Jekyll Island - Chapter 4

CannCon and Ashe in America hit Chapter 4 of G. Edward Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island and the target this week is the Savings and Loan industry. Griffin walks through how government housing subsidies starting in the 1930s pulled real estate out of the free market, created perverse incentives for reckless lending, and ultimately produced a bailout that cost American taxpayers the equivalent of $1.5 trillion in today's dollars. The FSLIC collapses to 2/10ths of a penny per insured dollar. The Federal Reserve bypasses Congress entirely to bail out Lincoln Savings. Accounting gimmicks turn insolvent thrifts into paper-solvent zombies hemorrhaging millions per day. Then Griffin drops the junk bond chapter: the high-yield market was thriving, outperforming Fortune 500 bonds, and creating 18 million jobs until the government declared it junk and forced a fire sale that conveniently handed the market back to Wall Street. Congress? Silent. Because it wrote the laws that caused all of it.