Costly scheme ended earlier
11 April 2012
The last serious financial crisis in the US banking industry was the meltdown of savings and loans companies — essentially building societies.
Eventually the FSLIC was swamped by the flood of failures forcing Washington to set up the Resolution Trust Corp (RTC).
It was funded with an initial $50 billion and took over the assets of failed firms and sold them off — often for just cents in the dollar.
The scheme worked, but was costly and took more than six years to solve the crisis. In all Washington injected $100 billion, with the RTC working through some $394 billion of assets.
