Banking Bad

This episode tells the story of Penn Square National Bank through the eyes of Lesylee Sullivan Hodge, who worked at the bank for a brief time before beginning a long career with the FDIC. What began as a small Oklahoma City bank became a symbol of how quickly a financial institution can go rogue when short-term profits, aggressive growth, a high-flying culture and large loan participations sold to other banks eager to share in the returns overwhelm basic discipline. When it all fell apart and the bank failed, its uninsured depositors and the FDIC paid the price. Lesylee’s firsthand account connects Penn Square to broader lessons about deposit insurance, bank resolution, and the people left behind when a bank fails. Lesylee’s later FDIC career gives the conversation unusual depth, showing both how a failed bank is handled by the FDIC and the emotional burden carried by those who must tell depositors their money is gone. 

Banking Bad examines past financial crises from the perspective of people directly responsible for steering the system through financial calamity. It tells the story of the real time, high-pressure decisions made to deal with bank failures, contagion events, financial rescues and the human decisions made to bring the financial world back from the edge of systemic collapse. The people you'll hear from have an unusual vantage point. They are not Monday morning quarterbacks. When banks went bad, they were on the front lines meeting with the people whose lives were upended. They were the ones working around the clock to manage the problems and implement solutions. They will tell us what they have learned and what we should be doing to prepare ourselves for the next crisis. Whether the next crisis is triggered by cryptocurrency, private lending, fintech, social media, or something else and whether it spills over to the more regulated banking sector we can't know for sure. But what we do know is that the seeds for the next crisis are being planted today. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.