Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island?

Jane Gaskin did exactly that, trading in the family home to begin a new life in the

tropics.

But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets.

I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise,

the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder.

Wish you were here.

Follow the price of Paradise Now but right now we're in a time machine.

We're going to May of 1984. A failure of a bank. Troubled bank, Continental, Illinois, its

safety net in place, ponder's next hurdles. This is a bank crisis during Ronald Reagan's presidency,

the first term, the re-election was in November of 84.

Simon, one of the things that makes me smile about this piece in the Wall Street Journal that you posted

is the amount of money that's at risk here.

At one point it would guarantee all of the bank's creditors according to the Fed and the

FDIC also lent the bank $2 billion. Is that our assignment did we really live in a world

in which two billion was a lot of money apparently we did I mean I think now

you'd find that down the back of the couches in a lot of offices if you

went through them all thoroughly but yes that was a lot of money in those days we've

had a lot of inflation since then and that really tells you about it. This is a fascinating story. As we know in the

1970s there was a real push by most American administrations to become energy independent, which America has become now and that's good. But in those days it wasn't and one of the things that the banks were encouraged to do by the government was to lend money to anyone who was going to be doing some drilling or energy related stuff, usually in Texas, Oklahoma, and those places where there is oil.

And of course, some of those loans were awful.

And if that echoes with the move to get more people into the owner-occupied housing in the early 2000s,

...