Word: thrifts
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...Mart' s Sam Walton turns bargains into billions. -- The troubled temples ^ of thrift. -- Tension over smoking...
...frantic support operation was going on in Washington last week, but it may not be enough to prop up a large part of the $1.1 trillion U.S. thrift industry. By a 402-to-6 vote, the House of Representatives approved a $5 billion cash infusion for the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, backstop for the country's 3,200 federally insured savings and loan associations. That would almost, but not quite, bring the FSLIC back to being merely broke; last year the fund was $6 billion in the red by normal accounting methods. Normal accounting, however, has long since...
Bryan may overstate the case, but there is no denying the horrendous plight of the thrift institutions -- or rather of the one-quarter or so of the industry that is foundering by normal accounting standards. Last year the profits of all U.S. thrifts totaled $895 million, down from $3.85 billion in 1985. A year ago the 370 or so weakest institutions were hemorrhaging at the rate of $2.2 billion a year. Now those losses are running closer to an estimated $3.8 billion annually...
...latest round of the thrift fiasco began in 1980, when Congress last tried to make life easier for the savings institutions. At that time the industry was still reeling from the inflationary spiral that sent interest rates soaring and left the thrifts with billions of dollars of low-interest 30-year mortgages on their books. Congress tried to remedy the situation by allowing the thrifts to expand their business far beyond those traditional instruments into stock and bond investment as well as business loans, particularly in commercial real estate. At the same time, thrift deposits continued to receive federal guarantees...
...reform that allowed the thrifts to expand their business proved a major disaster in the Southwest, where a sizable number of thrifts stampeded into risky real estate loans and other questionable investments. In many cases the institutions also succumbed to old-fashioned peculation. A spectacular case in point was the Vernon Savings & Loan Association of North Dallas, which was shut down in March with a deficit of more than $350 million. Vernon was purchased in 1982 by Don Dixon, 48, a North Dallas real estate developer. In six years Dixon pushed Vernon's assets from $82 million to $1.7 billion...