The historical waning of the U.S. Savings & Loans

Published in Housing Finance International Journal.

At its founding in 1914, the original name of the association which publishes Housing Finance International was the “International Union of Building Societies and Savings & Loan Associations.” This narrow focus fit the times; the name got the unattractive acronym of “IUBSSA.” When it was 75 years old, and after the disastrous number of failures in the U.S. savings & loan industry during the 1980s, a broader perspective was reflected in a new name for the association in 1989: the “International Union of Housing Finance Institutions” (“IUHFI”). Fundamental change in housing finance markets continued, notably the great expansion of mortgage securitization, and showed this was still too narrow an idea. So 1997 brought a yet broader and still current name: the “International Union for Housing Finance.”

I had the honor of co-chairing the committee which proposed the by-law revisions of 1997 that included changing the name, symbolizing that the IUHF is interested in and welcomes participation from all forms of the essential, worldwide activity of housing finance, one of the largest credit markets in the world, as well as one of the most politically and socially most important. Financial evolution, as it has continued in the 25 years since then, shows that wider perspective to be the correct approach.

A fundamental idea governing the shape of housing finance in its historical form of building societies and savings and loans was what was called the “special circuit” of funding for housing finance. As Michael Lea, a former Director of Research for the IUHF, and Douglas Diamond, Jr. wrote in 1992:

“Housing finance traditionally has been an area of intervention by governments, especially through the creation of special circuits for [mortgage] funding flows. … In many countries, governments intervened in the market to set up special circuits, characterized by a significant degree of regulation, segmentation from the rest of the financial markets, and often substantial government subsidy.”1

American savings & loan associations were a large and perfect example of such a special circuit, with savings accounts, which received regulatory advantages, directly linked to mortgage loans, both of which got a lot of favorable political attention. In the U.S. case, the savings & loans were required by law and regulation to make principally very long mortgage loans, with the interest rate fixed for 20 or 30 years. A special circuit was also represented by building societies in the United Kingdom and other countries, thus making up the two parts of the original name and membership of the International Union of Building Societies and Savings & Loans. As Lea also wrote:

“Specialist-deposit funded institutions… traditionally dominated the provision of housing finance in Anglo-Saxon countries (for example, Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States) as well as Commonwealth countries… Through most of the 20th century, the building societies/savings & loan model dominated housing finance in the English-speaking world.”2 In the U.S., the specialist institutions included, in addition to the savings & loans, their close cousins, the mutual savings banks, known together as “thrift institutions.” In 1980, there were 5,073 thrift institutions in the United States.

As Lea observes, “Starting in the 1980s, this model began to lose influence and market share to commercial banks.” In the U.S., they also lost massive market share to the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as that duopoly’s government-guaranteed securitization replaced the balance sheets of thrifts for mortgage funding. By the late 1980s, one housing finance expert could write, “Mortgage-backed securities have forever blown apart thrift balance-sheet compartmentalization.”3

The decline of the special circuit was especially marked in the United States by the collapse of much of the thrift industry. There were failures by the hundreds. Between 1982 and 1992, 1,332 U.S. thrift institutions failed. That is on average 121 housing finance institution failures per year continuing over eleven years, or a rate of more than two failures per week for a decade.

The savings & loan industry as a whole became insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. The government’s deposit insurance fund for the savings & loans, the Federal Savings & Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), itself became completely broke. In 1989, the same year IUBSSA was renamed IUHFI, all these failures resulted in a $150 billion U.S. taxpayer bailout under the emergency Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act. Expressed in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars, that is a bailout of $350 billion.

This was a crisis indeed: the collapse of an entire housing finance structure of a special circuit promoted and guaranteed by the U.S. government. The thrifts had total assets of $796 billion in 1980, or $2.8 trillion in 2022 dollars.

Since the savings & loans had unwisely been required by the government to make primarily long-term fixed rate mortgage loans with their short term, variable rate deposits, when the Great Inflation of the 1970s resulted in double-digit interest rates—with 3-month Treasury bill rates reaching 15% in 1981—such a balance sheet was an obvious formula for disaster.

The savings & loans and other thrifts were, for example, financing assets yielding 6% with liabilities costing 10% or more, spilling an ocean of red ink. The savings & loan regulator of the time, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), tried earnestly, frantically, and unsuccessfully to avoid the fate of the industry, but it was too late.

Thomas Vartanian, a General Counsel of the FHLBB during the 1980s crisis, looking back from 2021, reflected on the culpability of the government, which had promoted and tried to protect the thrifts, but ended up first trapping them and then charging the taxpayers for their losses.

“In this government-made economic biosphere,” Vartanian wrote, “Savings & loans generally had portfolios of thirty-year fixed-rate that they normally held to maturity. Variable rate mortgages were disfavored and actually prohibited under federal law until 1981”—that applied to federally-chartered savings & loans. “A few states did permit state-chartered savings & loans to make variable rate mortgages…but most savings & loans were compelled by law to do what no sane businessperson would ever advocate: borrow short…and lend long”—very long.

Vartanian concluded, perhaps not too diplomatically, “This financial gross negligence had been imposed on savings & loans by federal law.”4 Of course it was all imposed with good intentions and with cheering from housing interest groups.

By 2000, the more than five thousand thrift institutions had shrunk to 1,589, a nearly 70% attrition. By 2022, the total had been reduced to 602, 88% fewer than as the 1980s began.

This was a dramatic shift in industrial structure from the days of the great post-World War II American housing boom, when savings & loans were the most important mortgage lenders. In this golden age of the savings & loans, the American home ownership rate increased dramatically, from about 50% in 1944 to over 64% in 1980. Waving the banner of housing and home ownership, the savings and loans were politically potent. Their national trade association, the U.S. League for Savings, was a political lobbying force to be reckoned with.

They had their own government deposit insurance fund and their own governmentsponsored liquidity facility, the Federal Home Loan Banks.

The list of the 25 biggest savings & loans in America in 1983 contained many names famous in housing finance circles in those days. How many do you think still exist, thoughtful Reader? Make your guess before you read the answer.

The answer is that of these 25 formerly industryleading institutions, the number still existing as independent companies is zero. Of the 25, 17 failed or were acquired by institutions that later failed. The other eight were acquired and became just a part of much bigger commercial banks. These 25 formerly well-known names are unheard of now, a good lesson for the young in the fragility of institutions and a source of nostalgia, perhaps, for old housing finance veterans.5

The U.S. League for Savings no longer exists, having first changed its name to the Savings and Community Bankers of America, then to America’s Community Banks, then joining with the commercial banks by becoming part of the American Bankers Association.

The Federal Home Loan Bank Board was abolished by Congress and replaced by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). The OTS was subsequently abolished, and its responsibilities moved to regulator of national commercial banks, the Comptroller of the Currency.

FSLIC was abolished by Congress and its deposit insurance fund first taken over by, and then merged into, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the guarantor of commercial bank deposits.

The Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) remain large and active, but the thrifts, which used to represent all of the FHLB stockholding members, now are only 9% of the members, while commercial banks are 58%.

Lea and Diamond concluded that “Political and market forces seem to have eroded the reasons for having special circuits and the ability to maintain them.” In the U.S. savings & loan case, they certainly did.