each month at that time.
Although the crisis first became widely apparent to the American public in the summer of 1989, it was in fact full blown by that time, having developed into a serious problem by the mid 1980s. The problems being experienced by the thrift industry were in 1989 and are today attributed to a number of factors. Chief among those factors cited by the Bush Administration, the Congress, and industry regulators are (1) fraud, (2) imprudent loans (to the small players in the oil industry, and to real estate developers in states heavily dependent upon the oil industry, which, in each instance, were severely and adversely affected by the collapse of world oil prices in the mid 1980s), and (3) a widening gap in the interest rate margin between earning assets and funding liabilities (which resulted, in great part, from home owners defaulting on long term, high interest mortgages issued in the late 1970s).
There was and continues to be, however, another factor involved in the problems of the thrift industry that both the Bush Administr
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