Savings and loan crisis: The United States Senate Ethics Committee issues a stern censure of California senator Alan Cranston for his "dealings" with savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating.
The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s (commonly dubbed the S&L crisis) was the failure of 1,043 out of the 3,234 savings and loan associations (S&Ls) in the United States from 1986 to 1995. An S&L or "thrift" is a financial institution that accepts savings deposits and makes mortgage, car and other personal loans to individual members (a cooperative venture known in the United Kingdom as a building society).
The Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) closed or otherwise resolved 296 institutions from 1986 to 1989, whereupon the newly established Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) took up these responsibilities. The RTC closed or otherwise resolved 747 institutions from 1989 to 1995 with an estimated book value between $402 and $407 billion. In 1996, the General Accounting Office (GAO) estimated the total cost to be $160 billion, including $132.1 billion taken from taxpayers.In 1979, the Federal Reserve of the United States raised the discount rate that it charged its member banks from 9.5 percent to 12 percent in an effort to reduce inflation. The building of S&Ls had issued long-term loans at fixed interest rates that were lower than the interest rate at which they could borrow. In addition, the S&Ls had the liability of the deposits which paid higher interest rates than the rate at which they could borrow. When interest rates at which they could borrow increased, the S&Ls could not attract adequate capital, from deposits to savings accounts of members for instance, and they became insolvent. Rather than admit to insolvency, some S&Ls took advantage of lax regulatory oversight to pursue highly speculative investment strategies. This had the effect of extending the period where S&Ls were likely technically insolvent. These adverse actions also substantially increased the economic losses for the S&Ls than would otherwise have been realized had their insolvency been discovered earlier. One extreme example was that of financier Charles Keating, who paid $51 million financed through Michael Milken's "junk bond" operation, for his Lincoln Savings and Loan Association which at the time had a negative net worth exceeding $100 million.Others, such as author and financial historian Kenneth J. Robinson or the account of the crisis published in 2000 by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), give multiple reasons as to why the S&L crisis came to pass. In no particular order of significance, they identify the rising monetary inflation beginning in the late 1960s spurred by simultaneous domestic spending programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" programs coupled with the military expenses of the continuing Vietnam War that continued into the late 1970s. The efforts to end the rampant inflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s by raising interest rates brought on a recession in the early 1980s and the beginning of the S&L crisis. Deregulation of the S&L industry, combined with regulatory forbearance, and fraud worsened the crisis.