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The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s was one of the worst financial disasters of the twentieth century. We argue here that much financial fraud of the sort that contributed to this debacle constitutes "collective embezzlement," and that this collective embezzlement may be the prototypical corporate crime of the late twentieth century. We further argue that the state may have a different relationship to this kind of financial fraud than to manufacturing crime perpetrated on behalf of corporate profits. In the conclusion, we suggest that an understanding of the relationship between financial fraud and state interests may open up new regulatory space for the control of these costly crimes. Our data come from a wide variety of sources, including government documents, primary statistical data on prosecutions, and interviews with regulators.

The U.S. savings and loan debacle is, or should be, of great interest to political scientists. Any public policy failure as costly as this one deserves study for that reason alone. Analysis of its origins and development may reveal why it has been so intractable. Such analysis also may illuminate a broader class of regulatory policy problems that the political process tends to manage poorly.Most writing about the savings and loan crisis has focused on its proximate causes. The deeper political roots of the thrift debacle have not been identified. As someone who has tracked the development of the thrift crisis and analyzed deposit insurance issues since 1986, I am convinced that the problems have a deeper structure, rooted in the organization of the U.S. political/regulatory system and its interaction with private markets. More specifically, the potential for this disaster was inherent in the original 1930s' design of deposit insurance and its associated regulatory policies. At this level of analysis, the challenge to policymakers posed by the thrift disaster can be appreciated and its similarities or differences with other regulatory problems examined.

This research departs from the problem of managing a Savings and Loan Cooperative (KSP) as a financial institution in Indonesia that is unable to develop properly in the current era of economic globalization. The Main Problem Discussed are the weaknesses in the implementation of saving and loan cooperative management in Indonesia currently and how the reconstruction of the management of savings and loan cooperatives should be based on justice values. The study uses sociological juridical methods that explore legal research data not only from the normative aspect but also from the sociology of law.The results showed that the implementation of the legal politics of savings and loan cooperatives so far has not been effective, this can be seen by the decreasing number of cooperatives in the Demak, Yogyakarta and Semarang districts As for weaknesses that result in the non-running of KSP management legal politics resulting in many KSPs that cannot develop, namely 1) weaknesses in legal regulations that do not clearly regulate the appointment of management who also take into account managements knowledge and experience of the operation and mastery related to information and communication technology 2) sources of capital that are not assisted by the government, making it difficult for the position of cooperatives in economic competition in the current era of globalization 3) inadequate access to adequate facilities and infrastructure and 5) insufficient KSP access in having a marketing network and cooperation network so that there is a need for a political Reconstruction of KSP management law based on the justice value contained in Pancasila and the Indonesian Constitution are by adding additional articles to Article 29 and 4 of Law Number 25 of 1992 concerning provisions relating to experience and knowledge and expertise in technological mastery in the criteria for appointing the management system and adding provisions related to the role both the central and regional government in KSP capital at the moment.

Abstract TWO perspectives prevail in analyses of the savings and loan industry's crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s: on one hand are claims of individual fraud and greed; on the other are arguments focusing on organizational factors, particularly the deregulated environment in which lax or nonexistant oversight encouraged "collective embezzelment." Both approaches rely on a narrow conceptualization of the concept of white‐collar crime that focuses on identification of the static dimensions that differentiate white‐collar crime from other crimes. We apply Schlegel and Weis‐burd's (1993) notion of white‐collar crime as more of an interactive process than a set of unique defining factors by combining a theoretical focus on the state's policy‐making process with an analysis of organizational and occupational crime to analyze the role the state may play in creating the structural environment facilitating those behaviors. We analyze the case of Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan Association to examine the behavioral effects of implementing a state policy of deregulation. The case suggests that state policy may not only regulate and restrict behavior, but actually contain defeating incentives that create corporate behaviors contradicting the policy's intention. This points to the limitation of state theory in its focus on de jure policy creation as opposed to de facto policy implementation and its behavioral and structural consequences. Finally, we suggest that organizational crimes may result not only from circumventing or violating laws that must be enforced; they may also derive from contradictions contained in the policies of state projects themselves. As such, organizational crimes and deviant behavior may be better understood as unintended consequences of the dialectics of state projects.

At a cost of $500 billion to American taxpayers, the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s was the worst financial crisis of the twentieth century as well as a crime unparalleled in American history. Yet the vast majority of its perpetrators will never be prosecuted, and those who were have received minimal sentences. In the first in-depth scrutiny of the ways and means of this disaster, this groundbreaking book comes to disturbing conclusions about the deliberate nature of this financial fraud, the political collusion involved, and the leniency of the criminal justice system in dealing with these "Gucci-clad white-collar criminals."Using material from over one hundred interviews with government officials and industry leaders and recently declassified documents, the authors show how—contrary to previous government and "expert" explanations that chalked the disaster up to business risks gone awry or adverse economic conditions—S&L leaders engaged in deliberate fraud, stealing from their own corporations to speculate on high-risk ventures. Tempted by the insurance net, perpetrators looted their own institutions in a new kind of white-collar crime the authors dub "collective embezzlement."Big Money Crime also demonstrates how systematic political collusion—not just policy errors—was a critical ingredient in this unprecedented series of frauds. Bringing together statistics from a variety of government agencies, the authors provide a close reading of the track record of prosecutions and sentencing and find that "suite crime" receives much more lenient treatment than "street crime," despite its significantly higher price tag. The book concludes with a number of modest, but no less urgent, policy recommendations to counter the current deregulatory trend and to avert a replay of the S&L debacle in other financial sectors.FROM THE BOOK:"We built thick walls; we have cameras; we have time clocks on the vaults . . . all these controls were to protect against somebody stealing the cash. Well, you can steal far more money, and take it out the back door. The best way to rob a bank is to own one."—House Committee on Government Operations, 1988