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Overview
From esteemed New Yorker writer Mark Singer comes this cautionary tale of the Penn Square Bank, the oil and gas broker in an Oklahoma City shopping mall whose collapse in 1982 staggered America’s banking industry. Recounting the whole spectacular story and its colorful characters, Singer makes brilliantly (and hilariously) clear what actually happened and why it had to happen in boom-time Oklahoma. Nowhere else did money flow in quite the same spontaneous fashion. “[A] tale of wonderful verve” (New York Times), Funny Money comes to life through Singer's vivid prose and continues to resonate in today's culture of corporate corruption.
Synopsis
Long-time New Yorker writer Singer narrates the rise and fall of Penn Square Bank, an Oklahoma City oil and gas broker, whose 1982 collapse staggered the US banking industry. He adds an afterword to this reprint of the 1985 book, putting the events in the context of later and all-too-similar ones. The essay lacks a table of contents, index, and bibliography. Parts of it originally appeared in The New Yorker. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publishers Weekly
An Oklahoma native and New Yorker writer, Singer tells the story of the Penn Square Bank, an Oklahoma City shopping-center bank whose 1982 multimillion dollar collapsebased on bad oil and gas loansthreatened the solvency of several national banks. This book ``does a brilliant job of explaining the fiasco,'' PW observed. (May)