Word: loaned
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that it was a great deal is a gross understatement. It was unbelievable," says a high-ranking savings and loan executive. So goes the industry's scuttlebutt these days about Robert Bass's takeover in December of the crippled American Savings & Loan of Stockton, Calif. In one of the sweetest deals ever bankrolled with taxpayer money, the intensely private Fort Worth billionaire, 40, stands to benefit hugely from a decade of regulatory laxity. His purchase of American Savings is the pre-eminent episode in a string of controversial bailouts last year in which regulators handed out gilt-edged gratuities...
American Savings (assets: $30 billion), which was once the largest thrift in the U.S., had got into the same trouble as many other go-go S & Ls. During the early 1980s its maverick chairman, Charles Knapp, furiously pumped up the company's growth with brokered deposits and high-risk loans. When the thrift suffered a run on deposits in 1984, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board seized American and installed fresh management. But the new team gambled and failed in a multibillion-dollar investment in mortgage-backed securities. When the Bank Board went looking for help again, it eventually decided...
...total amount of cash that the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation will pump into the thrift to make it lucrative for the new owners is estimated at $1.7 billion to $2.5 billion. The arrangement clearly adds up to a sure-thing profit for Bass. American Savings will be split into two entities: a "good" S & L to hold $15.4 billion in healthy assets and a "bad" one that will liquidate $14.4 billion in sour loans and other assets. For a total investment of only $500 million, the Bass Group gets 70% ownership of the good thrift. FSLIC controls...
Bass has thus managed to buy a huge, healthy S & L, complete with a network of 186 branches, for a relatively tiny amount of capital. More than half of his thrift's assets consist of another sure thing: a $7.8 billion loan to the "bad" S & L that is fully guaranteed by FSLIC to pay a handsome 2% more than the going cost of funds. That will pump some $160 million in annual interest into the Bass thrift, no matter how much trouble FSLIC has in getting rid of the bad assets...
...film, George Bailey took that advice to heart and, despite the requisite dramatic difficulties, made his family's building and loan association a pillar of the community. But in real life, the outcome has been much different. America's failed savings and loans have become the country's biggest, most scandalous financial mess. Devastated by a legacy of bad management, rampant fraud and inept Government supervision, more than 500 of the 3,150 federally insured thrifts had fallen into insolvency as of the beginning of last year. Because the U.S. failed to own up to the problem and launch...