By Mark Singer, Mariner Books, still available in paperback
ESSENTIAL OKC HISTORY
Review: This account of the collapse of Penn Square Bank is a quick, interesting reader but probably not the book all of Oklahoma City has been waiting for. Â
The thin-skinned may bristle at the author’s unflattering assessment of the aesthetic attributes of Oklahoma City in general and downtown in particular. Some may find snobbery in his subtle but pointed observations about local diet, dress and speech.
Singer, a Tulsa native, Yale graduate and staff writer for The New Yorker, is no kinder to the principals of Penn Square, the bank and the disaster. But “Funny Money” presents a readable perspective on the historic failure that is filled with color and anecdote.
Singer begins by setting the scene western Oklahoma. He describes it as an area with “no natural beauty and very little water” that was settled in part by “Dixie interlopers … who resented having to work for a living but were nevertheless willing to put in a few hours a day devising ways to rook the Indians out of some more land.” He quotes an Oklahoma City acquaintance who says the class of borrowers represented by one of Penn Square’s bad energy accounts “could never get banked in Tulsa.”
Considerable print is used to explain the environment that would encourage Penn Square’s lending crusade in western Oklahoma’s deep-gas Anadarko Basin. Elements of that backdrop include a national policy of greater energy independence, deregulation of deep gas prices and the lure of overnight wealth.
But the catalyst is the characters, four of whom Singer depicts as follows: Bill P. “Beep” Jennings, bank chairman, possessing a grandfatherly disposition and folksy charm, but no stomach for saying “no” to bad credit risks. William G. Patterson, the bank’s chief energy lending officer, named “Monkeybrains” by college friends but unable to part with his juvenile, fraternity house mentality when loaning hundreds of millions of dollars. J.D. Allen, bankrupt city oilman and large Penn Square borrower, an overstimulated amateur suffering from grand delusions about his place in the world oil community. Robert A. Hefner III, city oilman and Penn Square borrower, a deep-gas visionary long on style and short on ventures that make money for any participants other than himself.
Though different in many ways, all of the main players are bound by one characteristic the love of a deal. Singer finds that deal-making at Penn Square took on a life of its own apart from the broader mission of the institution and the realities of the oil patch. The author highlights the excesses of those heady days through examination of a few of the drilling projects Penn Square financed. He explains that Penn Square began relations with money center banks that bought almost $2 billion in bad Oklahoma energy loans in an astonishingly casual manner.
The book presents a well-written chronology that is informative without being overly technical. Those seeking a more technical analysis will prefer “Belly Up,” a report of the failure written by Phillip L. Zweig, a former American Banker writer who now works for The Wall Street Journal.
– Kevin Laval, 1985, The Daily Oklahoman
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