Word: thrifts
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...Thrift executives pressured Congress to let them fight back. In 1980 Congress lifted restrictions on interest rates that S & Ls could pay. But regulators waited a year before freeing the other side of the balance sheet by allowing S & Ls to grant adjustable-rate mortgages. The delay left the thrifts in a bind, because interest rates had rocketed from 13% at the end of 1979 to more than 20% a year later. Thrifts were collecting interest rates of around 8% or less on their 30-year mortgages, while paying double-digit interest to new depositors. During 1981 some...
Troubled S & Ls are heavily concentrated in Texas and California, where state thrift regulations were loose and local economies had booms and busts. Many Texas thrift owners who pumped money into energy ventures when oil sold for $29 per bbl. in 1983 saw their collateral collapse in value when prices plummeted below $10 in 1986. In California some thrifts invested in real estate markets that became glutted, including Los Angeles office towers and Beverly Hills condominiums...
...overall losses would have been vastly smaller if Government regulators had seized control of insolvent S & Ls years ago. In 1983 the cost of the bailouts was estimated at only $10 billion. But the FSLIC never had enough cash simply to close down the thrifts and pay off the depositors. The Bank Board lobbied Congress for more money, but the politically powerful thrift industry consistently opposed such requests, along with almost any proposal to rein...
Instead of liquidating insolvent S & Ls, regulators decided it would be cheaper and more expedient to sell them to private investors or merge them with healthy thrifts. Bank Board Chairman M. Danny Wall sharply stepped up the tempo of such sales last year, selling or liquidating more than 200 thrifts at an estimated cost to the Government of $39 billion in tax breaks and other incentives extended to the buyers. Critics contend that the regulators were taken for a ride. Fumed Iowa's Leach: "The dealmakers are laughing all the way to the piggy bank." But Wall staunchly defends...
...thrift industry that survives the coming decade will probably look very different from what it is today. Says Jonathan Gray, who follows the industry for the Sanford C. Bernstein investment firm: "If there's one word to describe the industry's future, it's turmoil." Gray envisions a severe industry shake-out. In just a decade, he points out, the number of U.S. thrifts has already fallen from 4,200 to less than 3,000. By the late 1990s, he predicts, there will be just 1,000 left...