S L Debacle

Poor Charlie Keating, Mary Elaine and their six beautiful children and 23 grandchildren, all of whom have no doubt benefited from grandpa's millions in profits made from his S&L debacle. Otherwise, where has all the money gone, now that poor Charlie is dead broke? I'm sure it is distributed among them from their loving, caring father so it cannot be easily traced. Justice will be meted to him, I hope. ALICE ADAMS Laguna Hills

Bankers, politicians and economists grasping for ways to address the financial crisis are rallying behind a solution with its roots in the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s -- the creation of a single government agency to buy up billions in bad bank debt and other assets. The idea, which is gathering steam almost as fast as some of Wall Street's leading institutions have collapsed, is to create a relief agency along the lines of the Resolution Trust Corp.

Re "U.S. Coin Redesign Close to Approval in Congress," Dec. 6: So Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) is at it again: spending other people's money for his personal desires. We taxpayers will be paying for his role in the S&L debacle for a long time to come, and now he wants us to foot the bill for redesign and minting of new U.S. coinage. Why? Because his socialite lady friend considers our present coinage to be ". . . ordinary and boring." In these troubled times, this is the height of political arrogance, and our President and Congress should tell Cranston his free-spending days and ways are over.

Gov. Gray Davis has been pounding away for months, trying to get federal energy regulators to help California. So have Sen. Dianne Feinstein and state legislators, to little apparent avail. Now comes attorney Joe Cotchett, veteran trial lawyer, agreeing to represent California for $1 a month, and filing a suit that seeks to force the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to set just and reasonable wholesale electricity prices.

The review titled "The Loan Rangers" by Robert Kuttner in the Dec. 30 Book Review covers the why and the how of the S&L debacle. However, it does not point out the unfair advantage S&Ls had that enabled them to make a profit earlier. I believe that when I started saving in the 1950s, the typical payout to savers by an S&L was restricted by law to about 2.5%. This was considerably less than "rich people" could get on their (uninsured) savings. At that time, inflation was low, but not so low as to be covered by S&L interest before income taxes.

OPEC caused a crisis in the world when it decided to tell us who owned the oil fields. Shortly thereafter economic disruptions reverberated throughout the world. In the United States, this translated into inflation and an upset in a long-standing stability in interest rates. Caught in this storm, savings and loans, having loaned money out at low rates on 30-year paper, were caught in the bind of paying higher rates on short-term deposits. Faced with the problem of salvaging this situation, the Administration and Congress decided that the "easy way" would be to use the current "Reagan thinking" in free market systems, which was so popular with the voters.

Federal regulators asked Congress on Wednesday for another $100 billion in the next year for the federal bailout of defunct savings and loan associations and warned that the bill would get far bigger if the economy tips into recession. "It is clear that the problems in the thrift industry are much more severe than was anticipated a little over a year ago," said L. William Seidman, chairman of the Resolution Trust Corp. "The number of troubled thrifts has turned out to be much greater than anticipated, and the market for the assets of insolvent thrifts has turned out to be more difficult than anticipated."

"A person who makes a contribution has a better chance to get access than someone who does not"--a quote from Sen. Cranston (in his deposition to the Senate Ethics Committee) as to why he intervened on behalf of Charles Keating with the bank regulators. This certainly says a lot about Cranston's view of the workings of democracy. JOHN CORCORAN Playa del Rey

Donald Trump's crumbling real estate empire will be examined next month at a hearing called by House Banking Committee Chairman Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.), it was revealed today. Gonzalez said aggressive oversight is needed now to ensure that banks do not go the way of the thrift industry. Gonzalez, who had staff investigators in New York last week, has asked bank regulators and Trump lenders to testify at the hearings, to begin Aug. 9.

January 30, 1989 | DONALD E. BURNS, Donald E. Burns is a former secretary of the California Business and Transportation Agency and assistant general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. and

The search for scapegoats over the thrift industry debacle has targeted current and previous federal and state regulators, greedy acquirers of insolvent thrifts, incompetent and/or criminal S&L managers, Congress and the President. While there certainly is enough blame to go around, nowhere does one see any references to what started the slide down: the banking industry "reforms" of the mid-1970s.

KPMG Peat Marwick, which once audited the books of nearly half the nation's banks and thrifts, said Tuesday that it will pay the federal government $186.5 million to settle allegations that its work played a role in the failure of several savings institutions dating back to the 1980s. The settlement is the latest in a series of deals the government has reached with America's biggest accounting firms for their part in the savings and loan debacle and the failure of dozens of banks.

ITT Sheraton Corp. said Friday that it has purchased the infamous Phoenician Golf & Tennis Resort, a 580-room luxury hotel in Arizona that was built by Charles H. Keating Jr. for nearly $300 million a decade ago and now stands as a garish monument to the nation's savings and loan debacle. The Boston-based lodging giant would not disclose the sales price, but said the purchase also included the 344-room Crescent Hotel in Phoenix as well as 63 acres that surround the Phoenician in Scottsdale.

July 25, 1993 | Tom Schlesinger, Schlesinger is director of the Southern Finance Project, a North Carolina-based research center that monitors financial markets and policy issues

Between 1986 and 1991, over 1,000 U.S. banks failed--more than went belly up during the previous 52-year history of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the agency charged with insuring America's bank accounts. Erupting in the wake of a megabillion dollar savings-and-loan collapse, the banking crisis devastated public confidence. In September, 1991, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll revealed that 62% of Americans had doubts about the soundness of their nation's banking system.

The Bush Administration fell short of its promised effort to combat the multibillion-dollar fraud that led to the collapse of banks and thrifts nationwide, congressional investigators asserted Friday. The General Accounting Office said President Bush's Justice Department treated the bank fraud debacle like "other enforcement matters," and allowed bureaucratic turf battles to prevent a coordinated attack.

Re "U.S. Coin Redesign Close to Approval in Congress," Dec. 6: So Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) is at it again: spending other people's money for his personal desires. We taxpayers will be paying for his role in the S&L debacle for a long time to come, and now he wants us to foot the bill for redesign and minting of new U.S. coinage. Why? Because his socialite lady friend considers our present coinage to be ". . . ordinary and boring." In these troubled times, this is the height of political arrogance, and our President and Congress should tell Cranston his free-spending days and ways are over.

It's not always as obvious as an empty office building, but the national savings-and-loan crisis is a matter of bricks and beams all over Ventura County. At a house in Simi Valley. In a Ventura condominium complex. And yes, on Main Street in Santa Paula. In the last year, failing financial institutions have handed over millions of dollars' worth of Ventura County real estate to the newly created federal Resolution Trust Corp.

The review titled "The Loan Rangers" by Robert Kuttner in the Dec. 30 Book Review covers the why and the how of the S&L debacle. However, it does not point out the unfair advantage S&Ls had that enabled them to make a profit earlier. I believe that when I started saving in the 1950s, the typical payout to savers by an S&L was restricted by law to about 2.5%. This was considerably less than "rich people" could get on their (uninsured) savings. At that time, inflation was low, but not so low as to be covered by S&L interest before income taxes.

Security Pacific Corp.'s disclosure this week that it will lose as much as $360 million in the fourth quarter is the latest in a string of bank problems nationwide that has put to a test the public's confidence in the nation's banking system. Virtually every day, more bad news surfaces from the corporate suites or the halls of Congress. On Tuesday, for example, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman L.