The press has greatly exaggerated the role of illegal fraud in these matters with much time spent excoriating the likes of Donald Dixon at Vernon S&L and Charles Keating at Lincoln Savings. True, these flops cost the taxpayer well over $3 billion dollars, but all the illegal fraud put together amounts to only about one-half of one per cent of the total losses so far.90 Focusing on that minuscule component serves only to distract from the fact that the real problem is government regulation itself.
