In Episode 2, Joe Withrow takes us inside Bank of America's Special Assets Group — and what he found there was worse than anything he saw at Wells Fargo.

After walking away from the loss mitigation department, Joe thought he'd landed his big break. A pristine downtown tower. An officer title. Real banking work — financial analysis, risk assessment, doing it by the book.

Then he submitted his first reports. The next morning, every single one came back rejected.

What the manager told him next — and what Joe was actually being asked to do to small business owners across America — convinced him that the problem wasn't one department, or one bank. It was the entire corporate banking sector.

Topics covered:

• The hidden reality of Bank of America's Special Assets Group
• What "risk assessment" actually meant in practice
• How banks used acquisitions to prey on small businesses that never chose to be their customers
• The moment Joe knew he had to get out entirely

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In 2009, Joe Withrow was a young banker sitting inside Wells Fargo's loss mitigation department — in an obscure industrial park on the edge of town — watching the government and the banks quietly bury the 2008 mortgage crisis.

What he saw changed everything. Banks were rolling fees and penalties into modified loan balances, adding tens of thousands of dollars to mortgages on homes whose values were collapsing. Nobody was tracking loan-to-value ratios. And when Joe raised his hand and asked a basic question, his boss told him to keep his head down and his mouth shut.

This is where the Phoenician League begins. Episode 1 of the podcast — the inside story of the 2008 mortgage crisis from someone who was in the building.

Topics covered:

• The hidden incentive structure behind mortgage modifications
• How the government and banks partnered to make the crisis disappear — not solve it
• The moment Joe realized something was deeply wrong with the system
• Why asking questions was not acceptable inside the corporate banking world

Subscribe to catch a new episode every week.