Word: thrifts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...savings and loan associations that dot southern Ohio seldom stir up any & excitement in the banking community, much less a panic. Yet for a few tense days last week, a crisis involving Ohio's thrift institutions sent tremors of anxiety through the financial world. Governor Richard Celeste's emergency shutdown of 69 privately insured thrifts, which were threatened by customer runs, was the most widespread closure in the financial industry since President Roosevelt declared a one-week national bank holiday in 1933. Ohio's closed-door policy was originally intended to last for only three days. It dragged on through...
...thrift holiday cut some 500,000 Ohio depositors off from a total of $4 billion in savings. "The longer this goes on, the scareder I am," said Mary Lou Dehler of Cincinnati, who with her husband Richard, a retired postal worker, had accounts in Molitor Loan & Building. "My stomach just rolls over. They have got my whole life in that bank." The financial suffering in Ohio rattled consumers across the U.S. and worried foreign investors as well. In a classic sign of anxiety, moneymen bid up the price of gold by $35.70 last Tuesday, to $339 an ounce...
Ohio's trauma probably further eroded the public's confidence in the safety of its deposits. "This problem with S and Ls is getting real widespread," said Accountant Bruce Humpherys, a thrift depositor in Pittsburg, Calif. "I'm wondering what's happening to our whole financial structure." The concern showed up dramatically in Pollster Albert Sindlinger's weekly survey of consumer sentiment. The percentage of people voicing confidence in the economy fell in one week from 50.4% to 42%, the steepest drop in the poll's 30-year history. "I wouldn't say consumers are panicked," said Sindlinger, "but they...
...depositors across the U.S. to wonder, maybe for the first time, just who insures their money. The large majority of deposit-taking institutions are federally insured--83% of S and Ls, for example. But 30 states, including Massachusetts, Texas and Illinois, permit at least some of their commercial banks, thrift institutions or credit unions to rely on private insurance funds...
...Ohio experience could start a movement to force all banks and S and Ls in the U.S. to buy federal insurance. Says one congressional staffer: "Given the weakened condition of the thrift industry, another crisis is likely to happen unless there are changes made in the current system." Rhode Island Democrat Fernand St Germain, chairman of the House Banking Committee, has asked federal regulators to advise him on whether they believe private insurance is adequate...