Market forces, not scoundrels, destroyed the savings and loan business. So says Martin Lowy in what is truly an inside look at the savings and loan crisis. Drawing upon his experience as a practicing attorney, bank officer, and savings and loan director, Lowy provides an expert account of the problems that have overwhelmed the nation's savings institutions and their government regulators. High Rollers is the first book on the S&L crisis that provides an analytical groundwork for technical and nontechnical readers--so that both can comprehend what happened. Lowy's clear, readable style allows him to quickly describe the origins of the problems in new market forces and new technologies, and how the problems grew out of control as a result of regulatory mistakes and congressional inaction. Even his discussions of real estate lending practices and accounting issues are, in the words of Professor Horvitz, "both clear to the novice and instructive to the professional."
Martin Lowy, a native New Yorker, was educated at Amherst College and Yale School, where he was managing editor of the Yale Law Journal.
He spent the first 20 years of his career as a corporate lawyer, practicing as a partner at Hughes Hubbard & Reed and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. His main fields of practice were banking a securities law, with an emphasis on regulated institutions. In addition to representing banks, mutual funds, a major accounting firm and a large auto company, Mr. Lowy represented the New York State Superintendent of Banks in problem bank situations and represented the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the liquidation of Franklin National Bank, at the time the largest bank failure in American history.
Mr. Lowy served on the staffs of several commissions to reform the banking laws in New York and nationally, and taught in the graduate banking program at Boston University Law School. He has served on the boards of directors of banks and corporations.
Mr. Lowy left the practice of law to become a senior bank executive. He served as vice chairman of a regional bank for three years.
After that tenure, the savings & loan debacle story attracted him. He found that the books being written on the subject were trying to sensationalize the story; the facts, he felt, were sensational enough. So he wrote High Rollers: Inside the S&L Debacle, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1991. The U.S. Supreme Court cited High Rollers as the authority on the subject.
During the 1990s, Mr. Lowy founded a high-tech sports simulation company, which he ran for seven years, creating state-of-the-art games and making sales throughout the world.
Mr. Lowy's books include the Practical Handbook for Bank Directors (published in 1995), an acclaimed "how-to" book that is used in over 200 bank boardrooms, Corporate Governance for Public Company Directors (published in 2003), and Think Better Golf (also published in 2003).
He took a few years off, having such a good time playing golf and enjoying the Florida sunshine that he wrote no books for five years. But at the end of 2008, the financial crisis subject grabbed him, and he dove into Debt Spiral: How Credit Failed Capitalism full-time, resolved to bring to the economic crisis of 2007-2009 the same professional and direct approach that he took successfully in High Rollers.
Published in October 2009, Debt Spiral is, Martin Lowy believes, an important book. It is the first real history of the Crisis. It also extracts from the Crisis the lesson that America and Americans rely too much on debt and that the Government's various subsidies for debt are part of the problem.
At this writing, Debt Spiral has just been published.
Mr. Lowy already is at work on a brief sequel to Debt Spiral that will outline in greater detail the policy recommendations that appear in Part III of Debt Spiral.
Martin Lowy is neither a leftist nor a rightist; nor is he a wishy-washy centrist who advocates a little of this and little of that. He finds that both the left and the right have seriously flawed views of the economic world. His mission is to explain the economic world to the public so that they can see behind the various masks that ideologues adopt.
