The FDIC and the former FSLIC were funded by premiums imposed on banks and S&Ls, respectively, and both had implicit access to the U.S. The losses accrued primarily to the federal insurance agencies and taxpayers rather than to depositors and other creditors because the insurance effectively guaranteed the par value of deposits up to $100,000 per account de jure and, except at some small banks, almost any amount of deposits and even borrowings de facto, regardless of the value of the bankвЂ™s assets. For S&Ls, the loss was near $200 billion, some $150 billion of which was beyond the resources of the FSLIC and was therefore charged to U.S. For banks, the loss to the FDIC and thus to other solvent banks was about $40 billion. taxpayers, who were forced to make good on the losses after the resources of the S&L insurance fund had been exhausted. The costs of the failures were high, not only to the shareholders of the failed institutions, but also to the surviving institutions, which were required to pay premiums to the deposit insurance agencies, and to U.S.

In addition, an even larger number of institutions were in precarious financial condition at some time during this period.

These resolutions represented about 10 percent of all banks at the beginning of the period and 25 percent of all S&Ls. Between 19, when fundamental corrective laws were enacted, some 1,500 commercial and savings banks (insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) and 1,200 savings and loan associations (insured by the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation) failed and were resolved by the regulatory agencies. The crisis affected commercial banks, savings banks and savings and loan associations (S&Ls). In the 1980s, the United States experienced its most serious banking crisis since the 1930s and the second most serious crisis in its 200-plus year history. The author is indebted to Herbert Baer (World Bank) and Larry Mote (Comptroller of the Currency) for helpful comments and suggestions. This paper is a shortened version of a longer paper presented at the International Conference on Bad Enterprise Debts in Central and Eastern Europe in Budapest, Hungary on June 6-8, 1994. Kaufman is the John Smith Professor of Banking and Finance at Loyola University of Chicago, and is Co-Chair of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee.

Floating foundation of photography 1982