Looting

In a great little interview on the Renegade Economist Talkshow, Tim O' Reilly mentions a 1993 paper by George Akerlof and Paul Romer called Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit. The central idea is that there's a difference between creating wealth and extracting wealth from the economy.

The paper was the subject of a write-up in the NYTimes: The Looting of America’s Coffers.