ABSTRACT
The government played a remarkably unhelpful role in the scandal-ridden decade of greed. By the time that Michael Milken was negotiating with prosecutors, he had joined RJR Nabisco's chief executive Ross Johnson and the most infamous S&L operators as a widely vilified symbol for an era of greed and excess. Examples of outrageous behavior—even looting their own banks—on the part of S&L executives abound. As a California regulatory official noted, "The best way to rob a bank is to own one". The match of Milken's high-yield investments and S&Ls desperately seeking yield was made in heaven, and Milken was quick to consummate the union. Joseph W. Drexel aggressively courted thrifts and recruited them as both issuers and purchasers of junk bonds. Drexel had no Washington office or registered lobbyists before 1985. Moviemaker and conspiracy buff Oliver Stone's classic movie Wall Street, which debuted in 1987, almost immediately became an iconic symbol for the Decade of Greed on Wall Street.
