Funny money.

• Author: Remnick, David

Mark Singer's story of the rise and collapse of the Penn Square Bank is at once witty, meticulously reported, and a hell of a story. Singer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, found what a journalist dreams of: a controllable subject sitting in the middle of a far-reaching conflict, a small bank that operated during the oil boom as a middle man between the speculators in Oklahoma and major banks all over the country. Singer has also found himself a cast of characters worthy of a great movie comedy: bank executives, such as Bill "Beep" Jennings and Bill "Monkeybrains" Patterson, and borrowers who are as eccentric as J.R. Ewing and twice as foolish.

Singer's prose is direct, clear, and at times, wild. Unlike so much business reporting--there has been an explosion in that area lately--Singer has a knack for tying the facts of the case to a sense of their importance. Here is Singer generously providing what old newspaper folk refer to as "the big picture graph":

"Bad fantiasies loomed within easy traveling distance. What is first the Penn Square Bank folded, followed closely by the largest banks in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest, and what if those failures were followed by the failures of the industrial economies of, say, Mexico and...