Summary

On July 9, 2013, in New York City, author Matt Taibbi, sat in a small crowded courtroom to witness a rare occurrence – the prosecution of a bank. It was a pre-trial hearing with 19 defendants. The case involved no high-profile banks, however. Though CitiGroup, Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and others had destroyed 40 percent of the global economy in 2008, it was a small ethnic bank that was being taken to task to demonstrate that the government was indeed holding banks responsible for the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression.

Abacus Federal Savings Bank of Chinatown, however, had cost none of its customers any money, and had not destroyed any individuals or businesses. It was being held to account for the fact that many of its customers had lied about their income on home loan applications. These individuals did not lie about how much...